Insights

London’s Freedom Pass was introduced in 1973, and it has had a profound impact on the lives of Londoners, particularly, of course, those with a disability and those over state-pensionable age. But its very success may cast its future into doubt as the numbers and proportions of older people among London’s residents continues to increase, and as fares rise ahead of inflation.

Eligibility has changed somewhat over the years. Until April 2010, the pass was available to any London resident over the age of 60. Since then, the age threshold has risen in line with the state-pension age for women; it is currently 66, though it could rise further in future. Residents between 60 and 65 can pay £20 for a 60+ Oyster card, with all the benefits of the Freedom Pass within, but not outside, London. Eligibility for disabled people covers a wide range of disabilities, as defined ...

This article was first published in Housing Today.

Ben Derbyshire reflects on Sadiq Khan’s latest policies to boost housebuilding in the capital.

You could be forgiven for thinking, following Sadiq Khan’s volte face on building in the green belt, that Londoners would be all over this issue like a rash. Far from it, if the mood among members of the London Society and the London Forum of Amenity and Civic Societies at a meeting convened on 13 May is anything to go by.

The two leading London societies wanted to give members the opportunity to respond to the emerging strategy by the capital’s planners, set out in the recently published mayor of London’s consultation document, Towards a New London Plan. Our meeting was the first public presentation in the roll-out of consultation by the mayor’s planning team – quite a coup.

I took the chair, and we heard from Jules ...

In an earlier article, I mentioned that two-thirds of member societies are already represented on the new live member news page, which in turn provides selected articles for our weekly email to the whole membership, allowing members to share their news and knowledge across London. We select the stories that we feel are particularly newsworthy, or of benefit by way of information sharing to a significant part of our membership, and we assume you think this is a good idea too. Our aggregated membership is over 50,000 Londoners, so this could be significant.

One-third of societies are not represented, for the ...

London’s population peaked in the 1930s, reaching about 8.6 million in 1939. For the next half century it fell steadily, to 6.8 million in the 1980s, before beginning to rise again, to over 9.1 million now. But the experiences of inner London (broadly, the area governed by the London County Council (LCC) from 1889 to 1963) and of outer London (broadly, the areas added to the county when the Greater London Council (GLA) was created in 1965) have differed greatly.

Inner London’s population fell rapidly by over 40%, from 4.6 million to 2.6 million between the 1930s and the 1980s. By contrast, the outer London population rose from around 3.5 million in the 1930s to 4.5 million in the 1960s, before falling slightly to 4.2 million in the 1980s. Since then, both inner and outer London have grown by over a million people, to around 3.7 million ...

The government has at last launched a formal consultation on the creation of Great British Railways (GBR), several years after the launch of the Williams Review in 2018 that ended up as the Williams-Shapps report in 2021 recommending a GBR.

Although the previous Conservative governments gave oral support to a proposal which bore the name of their transport secretary, the closest they came to implementing it was a dummy Bill, a kind of dress rehearsal for what might become the real thing before the script had been written.

Labour supported Great British Railways in opposition and continues to do so.  An Act to renationalize the railways as franchises come up for renewal has already been enacted.  This should put a stop to the use of government subsidies that create profits and shareholder dividends for the train operating companies, and the absurd  legal costs whenever a train is delayed, as one ...

This article was first published in Housing Today.

Nobody wants new homes built nearby because what housebuilders do looks horrible and inevitably overwhelms local infrastructure – right? Well, hold on. How else can the government achieve its target of a million and a half new homes within the life of this parliament?

According to the 2024 Competition & Markets Authority report, in 2021-22 the largest 11 speculative housing developers together supplied around 40% of new homes built. The government response has been to instigate bold reforms to housing delivery targets for councils and an overhaul of the planning system, investing in affordable housing and encouraging SME developers.

Even with the welcome additional £350m funding for social housing announced last week, almost half of the increased supply is going to ...