Central London: A Key to Strategic PlanningAuthor(s): John GoddardSource: Area, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1970), pp. 52-54Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20000467 .

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Greater London Development Plan

Central London: a key to strategic planning John Goddard, London School of Economics

Few would disagree with the view that policies formulated for the city centre of a large metropolis often hold the key to the successful strategic planning of not only the built up area but of the entire city region. While clearly recognizing the importance of central London in the strategic planning of London and the metropolitan region, the

Greater London Development Plan unfortunately fails on two counts on its policies and plans for the centre. First, the plan does not demonstrate in sufficient detail and through hard research evidence what is the appropriate combination of activities for central London, and second, it fails to indicate a spatial arrangement for these acti vities within the centre.

The fundamental question is therefore what activities are appropriate for central London? The GLDP expresses a key policy objective in its statement that 'the activities that need to be in central London should be given opportunity to develop'. The GLC in this statement has therefore clearly indicated its preference for a selective approach towards planning the activity structure of central London. Unfortunately at the same time as setting out this deceptively clear objective, the Development Plan Statement is forced to admit that 'the activities that central London should accom modate is a subject calling for further study'. But without supporting research evidence the policy objective is inevitably a very hollow statement. The questions therefore remain. What activities? By what criteria is appropriateness for the centre to be assessed? And by what means is a selective policy to be implemented?

Office Location Problems Office employment continues to dominate the activity structure of central London. The success of the strategic planning policies depends very much on how the GLC handles the office location problem. Past experience suggests that the uncontrolled growth of office employment in central London, coupled with long distance commuting, was partly responsible for the growth of the outer metropolitan region in the 1950s, while current evidence indicates a process of office decentralization of gathering momentum, which is likely to have equally far reaching consequences for the location of homes, travel patterns and the economic base of London.

Because of the problem of identification and classification, office employment has been a field lacking readily available data. The GLDP does little to plug this infor

mation gap. One hoped for some detailed breakdown of office employment in central London both on a sectoral and occupational basis. There is also a lack of hard evidence as to how present market forces, coupled with planning controls, are affecting the mix of occupations and office types in central London. Many basic questions remain unanswered. For instance, what is the relative rate of growth or decline of managerial versus clerical employment? Are certain types of offices, for example insurance offices, leaving the centre more rapidly than others, and how are such trends affecting the viability of linked service firms? Is central London providing a suitable environment for the growth of new types of office-based activities ?

The definition of the office activities that are appropriate for central London depends not so much on the documentation of existing or developing situations as upon the criteria by which appropriateness can be judged. The GLC is strongly in favour of a basic economic objective for London of output or productivity maximization. It must be assumed that those office activities with a high level of output, measured in terms of

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Greater London Development Plan 53

net output per employee, are to be judged the most appropriate. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether the output criterion, which might be suitable for assessing the locational efficiency of manufacturing industry, is adequate for assessing what office activities need to remain in central London. In the first place manufacturing firms often cannot attribute a proportion of their output to their head office. Also, in addition to the sale of goods and services, the office is often involved in linkages in which no

monetary transactions take place. It is often through these information linkages - that are not directly concerned with sales or purchases - that many offices derive important external economies for their firms through locating in central London. For instance, through its contacts with the environment, a firm is able to adjust to changing economic circumstances and so ensure its long-run profitability. Nevertheless, the GLDP

maintains that the strength of existing linkages is not an adequate indication of locational efficiency and in any case it argues that these would be reflected in a net output index-provided that this index included a measure of non-marketed output. But as such an index is not currently available an important step in establishing the appropriate mix of activities must surely be to define the existing functional linkages between firms in central London and to establish which ones can be stretched over space without serious diseconomies to the activities concerned and also which ones need to be further strengthened.

A start will be made in answering these sorts of question in a project now nearing completion at the London School of Economics, sponsored by the South East Econo

mic Planning Council on Office Linkages in Central London. Detailed records of meetings and telephone contacts between a sample of businessmen in a variety of offices will form the basis of the analysis-which will indicate the types of office jobs and firms that are involved in a tight network of personal communications.

Implementation of an Office Policy Once it has established the criteria on which to base a selective policy, the GLC will then have to find a means to implement this policy. Clearly control of physical develop

ment is a very blunt tool for the type of detailed steering of economic activities that is implicit in the GLDP objectives. Planning permissions only influence the con struction of new office space, and since most new office building is speculative, and as there is a high level of turnover within the existing stock of premises, this mechanism is likely to be very ineffective. Office Development Permits at present operated by the government are subject to the same defects. Yet despite the limitations of its criteria and the limited tools at its disposal the GLC still maintains that the Development Plan provides a substitute which would be more effective than the present system of ODP's operated by the government. Clearly if their policies are to be effective the GLC will need to introduce some form of locational tax, perhaps analogous to the proposed local sales tax for London. But before the government is likely to grant such fundamental powers it will need better evidence than is provided by the GLDP of the council's ability to assess locational priorities.

Towards a Structure Plan for Central London Because the GLDP has failed to specify an appropriate activity structure for central London it has inevitably been unable to suggest an appropriate spatial arrangement for activities within central London. The Plan correctly concludes that central London is not one centre but many. It goes on to suggest that activities need to be relocated within the centre in order to create a more balanced pattern of movement. But nowhere in the Plan is there any picture of the present arrangement of activities and their relation to patterns of circulation. There is an obvious need to delimit possible functional districts where strongly linked activities could congregate so as to minimize traffic flows within central London. Such an exercise, if undertaken for the GLDP would have provided a useful framework within which the six central boroughs could have proceeded with their more detailed physical planning. This would have gone a long way to overcoming

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54 Greater London Development Plaui

one of the worst planning legacies of the London Government Act, namely the failure to designate a single authority responsible for planning central London.

The boroughs, through the Central London Planning Conference, are now attempt ing to develop a unified plan for this area, but with little guidance from the GLC.

Until this is completed, major planning decisions, like the Covent Garden re-develop ment, and the Piccadilly Circus scheme will have to be made without reference to any overall planning framework for the surrounding areas. Although the G.L.C. is supposed to be responsible only for strategic planning, there is a strong case for arguing that every planning decision concerning an area as vital to Greater London as the conur bation centre is a strategic decision and therefore responsibility lies with the GLC to prepare a detailed structure plan for this area.

Greater London Development Plan

Location policy for manufacturing industry Gerald Manners, University College London

The need to forecast the future size and structure of manufacturing employment posed some of the more challenging questions to the GLDP research team. In common

with many other large metropolitan areas, Greater London has been affected by a steady dispersion of its manufacturing activities. Sooner or later this was bound to present the central city and its inner suburbs with a long-term threat to their economic base, and also to challenge a cardinal tenet of the national strategy for the distribution of industry. The GLC planners, therefore, in searching for criteria which would distinguish between the most appropriate industries for a London location and the

more highly mobile, were also intent upon discovering an immediate means of prising out of the Board of Trade further IDC approvals; their longer term strategy, obviously, will be to press for a substantial modification of industrial location policies.

The Report of Studies notes that 'there is a need to ensure that those economic activities which contribute most to national output, exports or other national objectives by being in London, can obtain the resources to enable them to expand there' (p. 70), and reproduces research findings which, it is claimed, indicate the possibility of using

measures of productivity as a new and appropriate guide for public policy. An analysis of the 1958 Census of Production demonstrates that some types of industrial activity display a substantially higher average level of productivity-as measured by output per worker-in Greater London than in the country as a whole. It also shows that much the same range of activities-the vehicles, clothing and the paper, printing and publish ing groups amongst them-exhibited higher levels of productivity in the former London and South East region (900% of whose industry was in the conurbation) than in the Eastern and Southern regions. Alarmingly, these groups figure prominently amongst those industries which are tending to disperse most rapidly within south-east England.

The differences revealed by these productivity measures are certainly large enough to invite further inquiry into the relationship between productivity and location, and further work has in fact been commissioned by the GLC. As a basis for a major development plan, however, both their quality and their interpretation demand careful scrutiny. The data problems are, of course, immense. In judging a fluid geo graphy of manufacturing, marginal productivity is clearly much more significant as a

measure of efficiency than average productivity. This is admitted by the GLC. So is their preference in an ideal world for measures of net output per operative per hour

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