Wednesday 28 October 6.30pm at The Gallery, 77 Cowcross Street, EC1M 6EL

Notice is hereby given to member societies of the 2026 AGM of the London Forum of Amenity and Civic Societies. Doors open for networking, drinks and nibbles from 6.00pm. 

Agenda

1. Welcome and Introduction 
2. Approval of the Minutes of the AGM of 16 October 2025, available here
3. Chair’s Report – Chair Michael Jubb
4. Financial Report – Treasurer Ali Dezyanian 
5. Approval of the Annual Report and Accounts for 2025-2026, available here
6. Appointment of the Independent Examiner 
7. Election of Officers and Trustees 
8. Any Other Business

—  End of formal business  —

Presentations

We look forward to hearing from both our Patron Professor Tony Travers CBE and our President Ben Derbyshire.

Tony Travers will be sharing his view of the governance of London, how it works and could work better. This is particularly relevant in relation to the roles of the Mayor and the GLA in relation to planning and transport. Tony is a visiting Professor at LSE, and has researched and published on local government and London in particular over many years.

Ben Derbyshire will draw on his experience with Historic England to explore ways in which London can deal with the challenge of trying to meet the targets for net additional homes set by the Government and by the new Draft London Plan. He will draw in particular on Historic England’s recent report Good Growth, Heritage and Housing: Investigating Approaches to Future Housing in London.

Their presentations will be followed by discussion.

All AGM papers are here

Can you volunteer your time and skills to help London Forum?

We are all volunteers at London Forum and always welcome others to join us. It would make a big and positive difference to London Forum if new volunteers were to join us:

• With PR and social media skills to help raise London Forum’s profile
• With expertise in environmental matters to contribute to our advocacy work
• To help run members’ meetings.

Please contact the secretary if you are able to help or to find out more.

AGM Record

Chair Michael Jubb, AGM 2026

Treasurer, Ali Dezyanian, AGM 2026

Patron, Tony Travers, AGM 2026

AGM hospitality team

Audience AGM 2026

Accounts, AGM 2026

Tony Travers AGM 2026

Tony Travers AGM 2026

Tony Travers AGM 2026

President, Ben Derbyshire, AGM 2026

Ben Derbyshire AGM 2026

Ben Derbyshire AGM 2026

Ben Derbyshire – Housing Types – AGM 2026

Ben Derbyshire – “Enfield” – AGM 2026

Chair, Michael Jubb, welcomed the audience, made opening comments, and introduced the speakers: Patron, Prof. Tony Travers, and President, Ben Derbyshire.  He also made a special request for members to volunteer more help with our activities.

AGM Business

The minutes of the 2025 AGM and 2026 Annual Report were approved, the latter includes a financial report, which was separately presented to the meeting by Treasurer Ali Dezyanian.  AGM papers are archived as usual with historic papers on the AGM papers page.

Two Trustees, Paul Thornton and Lesley Hodsdon resigned this year, two trustees stood down on rotation, and were re-elected: Andrew Bosi and John Myers, the latter also taking the post of Vice-Chair. Helen McIntosh was elected as a new Trustee. We thank all Trustees past and present for their much-valued contributions.

Recordings, Presentations, Q&A and transcripts

Prof. Tony Travers

Tony Travers AGM 2026 presentation

Tony Travers used the evening of the Budget to compare London’s devolution settlement with the new strategic authorities spreading across England, and to ask what that means for the wider South East.

He began with the history: without Thatcher’s 1986 abolition of the GLC and the metropolitan counties, there would have been no London mayor and no city-region mayors such as Andy Burnham. The 2026 English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act now creates tiers of mayoral strategic authorities (foundation and established), with established status unlocking multi-year integrated funding settlements.

London remains in a different league. The GLA’s gross spending is around £24bn, roughly ten times Greater Manchester’s, and TfL alone outspends all the other authorities combined. London is far more self-funding, through fares, a council tax precept and retained business rates, while other mayors rely largely on central grants. It also has an older statutory base covering transport, policing, fire and planning, scrutinised by a 25-member Assembly; elsewhere scrutiny is weaker, drawn from councillors of the same authorities.

Outside London, mayors are gaining individual powers, including over planning, and London’s toolkit of call-in powers, development corporations and spatial strategies is being rolled out nationally. Police and crime commissioners are to be scrapped. The gap will narrow, but London will stay different in scale and revenue-raising. Travers doubted that Great British Rail will really hand London’s commuter lines to TfL.

Around London, Hertfordshire, Surrey, the Thames Valley and Kent are heading for mayors and combined authorities, each with its own London Plan-style strategy, which will change planning relationships across the South East. The model suits city regions better than rural ones, its long-term success is unproven, and it could be wound back by a future government. He closed with the changed political map of the boroughs since last year: more varied, yet Labour and the Conservatives together still poll 60–65% in London.

Q&A: 

1. Michael Jubb (Chair): Is the GLA a cipher, and could London move to a Manchester-style model where the mayor works with borough leaders? London Councils proposed something like this within the last 12 months, possibly using an electoral college to avoid 33 leaders at the table. The Mayor rejected it. It is possible, but there are no signs of it happening.
2. Michael Bach (Trustee): Does Assembly scrutiny work? It depends heavily on the committee chair; Planning and Regeneration gave the London Plan little scrutiny, Transport did better. There is a huge asymmetry of power between the Mayor and the Assembly. A co-witness at the Assembly’s Transport Committee suggested an independent “office of budget responsibility” for the Mayor to advise the Assembly.
3. Liam Curran (Sydenham Society, councillor for 24 years): Any prospect of more devolution to the boroughs themselves? Not at present. Devolution is going to mayoral authorities, and moving to unitaries would cut councillor numbers sharply (Essex from about 625 to 200-odd), worsening under-representation.
4. Norbert Kurcz (Knightsbridge Association): Are there international examples England can learn from? With no written constitution, the UK makes this up as it goes, so England could end up with many different forms. He suggested the Mitterrand reforms in France and Germany, but cautioned that those systems are more consistent.
5. Michael Coupe (Dulwich): Is this taking influence from the local level, particularly over planning and housing? The planning reforms are designed to shift power from councillors to officers, and the mayoral model lets mayors override boroughs, presumably in a pro-development direction. But not every mayor will do so: West Yorkshire has a Labour mayor with Reform leaders in four of its five unitaries, so politics is unpredictable.
6. Michael Ball (Just Space): Where do new authorities bordering London sit under the NPPF’s settlement/non-settlement presumptions, given growth needs beyond the GLA boundary? Government expects heavy development around under-built railway stations across the South East. Travers questioned whether mayors will deliver it, since local politics might push against it.

Ben Derbyshire

Ben Derbyshire AGM 2026 presentation

The Forum’s president, Ben Derbyshire, who also chairs Historic England’s Historic Places Panel, used his slot to challenge members to be more positive about housing. He opened by praising the Forum’s website and weekly civic-society update, acknowledging how much the Forum depends on its home in Alan Baxter’s building, and lamenting the lack of youth in the audience: the Forum, he said, must represent more of London if it wants influence.

He doubted London will deliver the 880,000-home ten-year target, with net additions around 31,000 a year, but asked whether the Forum supports more homes at all. He cited polling that about 70% of Londoners back more homes and nearly 60% back them locally. In his view the collapse in building stems from land speculation, interest rates, a roughly 50% rise in materials costs, labour shortages, post-Grenfell regulation he considers an overreaction, and falling viability and investor confidence, not mainly from planning.

He said his analysis of the newsletter found about three-quarters of member-society campaigns oppose housing, and urged the Forum to define and champion what good looks like, with more realistic imagery. He noted density varies from 9.5 dwellings per hectare in Bromley to 74.2 in Kensington and Chelsea, and that London at Islington’s density could double its population.

He promoted the GLA committee’s mid-rise report (six to nine storeys, reinstating the density matrix, co-produced design codes) and Historic England’s research on adaptive reuse (67,000 homes in heritage buildings nationally), sensitive intensification, small sites and “contextual transformation”. He noted the report omits tall buildings, and showed a popular Tower Hamlets social-housing block.

He closed by proposing the Forum run a positive contest or local juries, like the Oxford Preservation Trust’s, to celebrate good new buildings, which might also draw in a younger, more diverse audience.

Q&A: 

1. Fiona Fleming-Brown (Pembridge Association): How can the Forum co-produce design codes with communities while the government is removing public participation from planning committees? The speaker’s view is that the root cause is that public opinion mostly objects. If societies were clear about what they would not object to, the government’s tendency to bypass them might be avoided.
2. John West, (Enfield Society): Agrees more housing is needed, but disputed the pictures shown in the presentation, and says Enfield has many consented brownfield sites that developers aren’t building, so green belt shouldn’t be released first. The speaker agreed that viability is the problem, but argued societies needn’t add their voices of opposition when conditions are already tough.
3. Elspeth Clements (Trustee): The GLC judged tall buildings unsuitable for families and social housing, and developers can’t sell them now. Are they the slums of the future? The speaker said his last slide showed a popular social-housing block in Tower Hamlets, with feedback independent of his practice. He shares the concern about leasehold high-rise but sees build-to-rent as different.
4. Eileen Conn (Peckham/Southwark): Residents aren’t anti-development. The housing doesn’t meet needs (92% can’t afford it) and engagement comes too late. He agreed on engagement and said the GLA committee wants experiments in it. Increased supply won’t improve affordability by itself unless it is socially affordable housing.

Close. A show of hands on whether the Forum should promote a “what good looks like” contest showed about half in favour. The chair noted that adding to what the Forum does is hard and passed the challenge to member societies.