An Interview With Ken Livingstone: London's Planning Czar?

"KL: We are saying: let’s contain as much of the growth of southeast England as we can in London on brownfield sites, let’s get more intensive development of each site. Over the last four years in London, the number of homes per hectare has gone up by 300 per cent. We don’t want horrible American suburbia, towns that are absolutely lifeless except as people rush to and from work. We’re looking more to cities like Madrid or Paris in terms of intensity and development.

Can we really get 8.5m or 9m people in London without breaking into the green belt?

KL: Absolutely. I’m totally hostile to breaking into the green belt. London is the least dense large city in Europe, by a mile, and it’s not a question of dropping 20-storey towers in the wilds of Bromley—it’s about having intensive development around transport nodes, which doesn’t necessarily have to be high-rise, it can be medium rise, the sort of stuff you’ve got in Kensington and Notting Hill and so on. And you can go on to these awful old postwar estates, and say, “We’re doubling the number of people who live here,” and they say, “It’s high density already”; but it really isn’t, often it’s very low density, and that’s the problem—there’s no-one around in the day, there isn’t a social mix."

"You’ve been criticised for being too close to developers, and yet I take it that one of the reasons that the mayor of London has to be friendly to developers is that they are the only people who can really push the city onwards.

KL: You most probably never hear from the developers that I throw out of my office, with their ghastly schemes; but broadly the brighter developers will come to me with a well-designed scheme, and they will be signed up for a big Section 106 deal [which obliges a proportion of developments to be set aside for affordable housing].

So in a sense, you tax through them.

KL: In the old days, they would have gone into the GLC and no doubt paid a big backhander to some planning officer. Now they come in and they pay a big backhander to the city in the form of a Section 106. I think that’s an improvement. And I can get more affordable housing out of property developers than I can out of the government, which hasn’t funded any."