A noticeable feature in the morning now along Bell St,NW1 and many of the streets off it, are the Airbnber stayers in the neighbourhood.  Many local residents are aware of it and its impact on the local rental market and has been illustrated by all the attention given to the issue in Central London, where we have the biggest concentration of the Airbnb flats. 

A new angle has been given to me by a local hotelier, who feels the Airbnb flats are taking business from him when they don’t pay any VAT, business rates or corporation tax as well.  Given we have over 200,000 of these flats identified in Central London alone, l hope Central government takes up this issue.  This said we do need the Register of Short Lets to be live nationally as soon as possible.

I am also glad to tell you also that as soon as l reported it to the Westminster City Council, they have immediately acted with by an investigation by their Short Term Letting specialist Team. So watch this space on how matters develop on this front. It’s clearly a priority issue for the council’s enforcement teams! 

During a cost of living crisis, we see that Thames Water has gone to court for loan of £3 billion when it already has £17 billion debt, and wants to hike 53 per cent increase on our water bills to fund their dividends to shareholders where a third of customer bill will cover interest payments alone.

Now the full privatisation of water supply & sanitation is an exception today, being limited to England, Chile and some cities in the United States. Furthermore, public ownership is popular with 82 per cent wanting publicly owned water more popular than that of our railways in the UK already undertaken by the Labour government on Rail Operating Companies (ROCs).

Thames Water PLC record in London is pretty awful with a unused desalination plant built after 2008; in particular in W9 where even after Flip kiosks were installed we had flash floods in 2021 and they are a major cause of road roads in Central London as they keep digging holes for themselves.

We really should not permit the socialising of their losses, for it all to be return to them to profit by again in the future. That is the customer is bailing out the privatised water industry for the work they failed to do with the money we gave them before in the first place!

I just wish our MPs, AMs & Labour Groups and Mayor of London to make the case for public ownership similar to mutualization of water facilities by local & regional government in Wales for London as the folding up of Thames Water occurs over the next few weeks, for the residents of all our households in the constituency and beyond.

Walking through Broadley St Gardens to get to Paddington Recreation Ground regularly, is an amusing contrast this winter.  Where you’ll find the grass and planting in very poor condition and also physical infrastructure like the water foundation in Broadley St Gardens and along the Green Spine. And then you go to Paddington Rec, the grounds and playing facilities are in immaculate conditions, so not surprising it has a Green Flag accreditation. 

It is almost as though after the regeneration efforts in Church St Ward with the Green Spine, they forgot about the maintenance and management of this new green infrastructure in the middle of the ward. This while the Council is helping St Johns Church, Kensal Green in their Greening programme of the lawn, hedging and trees at the church!

So I trust the Council can make amends straight away before the spring and summer, where the Broadley St Gardens is intensely used by residents, school children and the working population. It has clearly fallen between Regeneration and the staff that manage and maintenance the Green spaces of the City. 

Its an intensely used space and illustrates well why we need more green space in Church St Ward. Who knows one day with when its much better managed and maintained similar to Paddington Rec, it will be accredited with a Green Flag as well!  

Now that New York City is charging for vehicles to enter lower Manhattan since the new year, albeit 20 years after we installed it in London, l wonder if the diplomats pay it at all, when going through the zone? 

I only ask this in light of our experience with diplomats not paying our congestion charge, particularly the US Embassy. And that with the UN Head Quarters based in Upper East Manhattan, New York does have one if not the highest concentration of diplomats in the world! 

When l was at the London Assembly, l annually asked about the outstanding amounts due to TfL from all the embassies including the US Embassy even though it has now moved outside the congestion zone from Grosvenor Square to Nine Elms. 

Information about outstanding debt owed by Embassies and Diplomatic Missions for non-payment of the Congestion Charge is regularly published by Transport for London at the following link: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/cclez-online-factsheet-embassy-debt-dec20.pdf

Now discount and exemption plans are available for the Congestion Relief Zone. A discount plan is available for low-income drivers, and exemption plans are available for individuals with disabilities or organisations transporting people with disabilities, emergency vehicles, buses, and specialised government-owned vehicles. Rightly so but clearly none for the diplomats working at the UN HQ. 

So it does mean that our British diplomats in New York are having to pay the congestion charge toll whilst its not being paid by US diplomats and others in London. Which does not strike me as fair at all. 

It is right and proper that the monies raised by the charge after helping to reduce the congestion in the Lower Manhattan, are used for investment in public transport as well on both sides of the Atlantic. I am not sure you can have it both ways though, not paying it here in London but charging diplomats in New York! 

Settling these long standing debts due to Transport for London in London would go along way in helping the provision of public transport for both resident, visitors and diplomats in London. 

With TfL proposing bus rerouting of the 205,30 and 27 coming so soon after the Central London Bus Review,  l have decided to make the same point l made then for the 205 bus route. As there are proposing to withdraw route 205 between Paddington and Baker Street station and extend it to Marble Arch via Baker Street

The 205 is a very useful service, as it links up the four main north London rail termini of Paddington, Marylebone, Euston, King’s Cross-St Pancras, and Liverpool Street Station. This is a particularly helpful link for those customers with accessibility requirements or who may have heavy luggage that make interchange with the London Underground more challenging. This is also a very useful link during disruption to the Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan, and Circle lines as it largely replicates their route.

The 205 bus service used to stop in Marylebone station forecourt, but in recent years this stop was removed to speed up the service. Chiltern Railways objected to this proposed change to the 205 at the time on the basis that it would negatively impact on the customer experience especially for customers with luggage or those with additional mobility needs, who may find interchange to the London Underground network difficult. The same will apply if there is no connection between Paddington and Marylebone Railway stations.

So in short, l don’t think the proposal does much at all for integrated transport between our bus service and rail terminuses, and l trust TfL will consider them as a result.

Finally the deadline for views and opinions has been extended till the 10th of January, so visit www.tfl.gov.uk/30-205-bus proposals and send your views to haveyoursay@tfl.gov.uk

https://www.ft.com/content/68ba72e3-08fa-465e-ab61-cfa94a58382c

Thankfully, some will say, the targets of housing for London have been dropped by 10,000 annually from targets set by the previous government as part of the present new governments 1,500,000 target of new homes. That is a total of 88,000 across the whole of London. Though when broken down to figures for each London borough, most of the increased targets are in Inner Central London towards West London boroughs like WCC, RBKC, H&F and very little emphasis in outer Londoner boroughs except for Bexley. Actually almost all the boroughs in Outer London had their figures reduced, so it can not be said to be impacting much on the green fields of Outer London at all really!

So its quite a bleak picture for housing in London in 2025 and beyond. 

After recently being interviewed by UCL post graduate student Veronica Li about some of the research work undertaken when l was Chair of the Environment at the London Assembly with Plugging the Energy Gap  Report, l wondered about what progress has been made since. . Then we established that London consumed some 16 per cent of all energy in the UK but only supplied 2-3per cent of it. The language has of course changed since then with the emphasis on Net Zero but nonetheless it is a worthwhile exercise. 

When the government was told in July by the independent Climate Change Committee (CCC) that it was falling well short of its “net zero by 2050” climate change target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, a similar warning about local targets seemed inevitable.

That came earlier this month, with the CCC telling the London Assembly that Sadiq Khan’s even more ambitious target of achieving net zero in London by 2030 was similarly in doubt. Now Khan himself has accepted that his targets are not just at risk but currently unattainable. “As things stand now, we are not on track to meet them,” he admitted yesterday at his November Mayor’s Question Time session.

It was a stark concession from a Mayor who first declared a “climate emergency” back in 2018, brought his original 2050 net zero target forward by 20 years, and has taken a leading role in the C40 network of cities across the world taking forward climate action. Why is City Hall’s target looking unattainable, and what should happen next?

In truth, Khan’s 2030 target always looked like a stretch, relying substantially on action by central government along with encouraging individual Londoners and London businesses to make changes, particularly with heating and transport – swapping boilers for heat pumps and petrol or diesel cars for electric, as well as driving less.

Take “retrofitting”, now a key focus. This means insulating the city’s homes and fitting heat pumps in order to cut the amount of heating they require by 40 per cent. It is essential work, given that around a third of London’s carbon emissions come from its homes, but it’s also expensive.

Around half of the city’s social housing stock alone – council and housing association properties, including Right to Buy homes within blocks – needs to be retrofitted. That’s about 500,000 homes, representing one in seven of all homes in the capital.

Despite Khan promising a “retrofit revolution” in 2021, progress has been sluggish. According to figures from London Councils, the cross-party boroughs’ grouping, just 3,057 social homes were retrofitted in 2022. Meeting the 2030 target would mean increasing the rate of retrofit 15-fold, with a price tag of some £13 billion.

That sort of bill can’t be met by councils and housing associations on their own, and there’s general consensus that national government hasn’t stepped up to the mark. Funding has fallen short and been “stop-start”, according to the local authorities, with councils forced to spend time bidding for cash.

There’s also a shortage of trained people to do the work and an overall fragmented approach, not helped by Rishi Sunak’s administration rolling back deadlines, particularly in the run-up to the general election.

Homeowners too seeking to make their homes more energy efficient have faced a “maze of complex process, confusing regulation and high upfront costs” according to a report last year from the lobby group BusinessLDN. High electricity charges have eaten into cost-effectiveness as well, and there’s also the “hassle” factor. Retrofit can be a big job, and not necessarily seen as a priority without clear government messaging – and a reasonable financial incentive.

Following the change of government, greater Whitehall support is anticipated, including possible multi-year funding settlements for the Mayor and boroughs allocated by need rather than by bidding. This would support what Khan said on Thursday would be a “genuine retrofit revolution”. Energy secretary Ed Miliband has just announced that planning permission requirements which were deterring heat pump installation will be scrapped.

But could City Hall have done more? A report last September from Green Party Assembly member (AM) and now deputy party leader Zack Polanski suggested that although government investment in retrofit remained inadequate, Khan was also dragging his feet, on training and procurement particularly. Recent research for City Hall and London Councils was relatively damning too. It found there was still “no collective strategy” on retrofit across the city “or indeed a means of communicating and gaining consensus”.

Current arrangements, the research said, were resulting in an “unpredictable” pipeline of work, holding back supply chain development, and a “pepper-pot” of uncoordinated projects, with successful pilots generally “under-exploited” and no system for coordinating efforts.

The report’s recommendation that a new “London Office of Retrofit” should be set up, to coordinate and plan retrofit work city-wide, identifying funding, improving the supply chain and speeding up delivery, is now being taken forward by Khan and the boroughs. “All is not lost,” he told AMs yesterday.

Does a missed target matter? Dr James Richardson from Climate Change Committee told the Assembly’s environment committee that getting things done was more important, and there’s certainly a range of action underway. But a target too easily set aside risks undermining the credibility of the policy itself, particularly in an area like climate change which is increasingly contested.

Has the climate change agenda become over-technocratic too, even while the need to win support for action is widely acknowledged? There is a big issue about the language we use all the time as well, as terms such as “net zero” were a phrase that a lot of people would not ever dream of using in their ordinary speech. 

On climate action, it maybe time for a new battle for hearts and minds perhaps?