You really couldn’t make it up. Less than two years after Sadiq Khan hit the most vulnerable Londoners with the ULEZ expansion tax, preaching that it had to happen as a drastic measure to improve our environment, the Mayor has announced plans to build on London’s parks.
Quite the move from the self-proclaimed ‘Greenest Mayor in History’. It turns out it is all good posturing on the green agenda while raking in cash from the poorest Londoners, but when big developers come calling, the Mayor is willing to sell off London’s parks.
Sadiq Khan has always proudly boasted ‘not one blade of grass’ when it comes to his defence of London’s green spaces and that they are ‘the lungs of London’. Recently, though, he has performed a screeching U-turn, which all started in the strangest of places.
Bizarrely, at a hearing of the Enfield Local Plan (setting out the Council’s building plans for the next fifteen years), a TfL official turned up and unexpectedly put forward representations to build on Trent Country Park.
In fact, not just to build on it, but make sure the proposal was for at least 10,000 units.
Seeming at odds with the Mayor’s previous messaging against building on green spaces, an answer as to his position on this was quickly sought by City Hall Conservatives.
However, he suddenly became extremely coy on the matter. This all seemed a bit rogue until one month later, when Khan came out in a press release and said: ‘We must build on the green belt.’
Perhaps a statement that wouldn’t be so suspicious if a month earlier, the ‘green belt’ in question hadn’t been identified as a country park.
So, to quickly address calls of Nimbyism, let’s make clear the Mayor is talking about building on parks and open green spaces used and loved by the public – not poorly classified green land such as petrol stations and car parks, which can already be redeveloped.
Sadiq Khan's screeching U-turn will do irreversible damage and is based on a false choice – Emma Best
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Currently, 300,000 planning applications are not built out across London, and there are thousands of brownfield sites to explore across to boot.
The idea that we are at the point of choosing between parks and housing is entirely false. It is also worth reminding our apparently eco-conscious Labour Mayor that the UK is considered one of the most nature-depleted countries in the World.
London has over 1,500 sites of importance for nature conservation (SINCs) covering 19 per cent of Greater London. In a densely populated city, our green spaces also provide the only access to outdoor space and associated mental and physical health benefits for many residents.
So why are we at the point of the Mayor suggesting such drastic action? Firstly, the situation he has led us to with London’s perpetual housing crisis becoming far worse under his leadership.
He’s only started 5,100 of the 35,000 houses he was supposed to build by 2026, and he’s done so badly that the Labour Government have had to water down his target to just half of what it previously was (and he still isn’t going to meet that). There’s a wealth of brownfield land in London that the Mayor should be developing on, and yet he isn’t.
Old Oak Common, for example, is one of the largest brownfield regeneration sites in Europe; the Mayor has yet to build a single home on it. Parks and green spaces are easy pickings, though, for a politically weak Mayor who has failed to unlock housing on appropriate sites across the capital.
And in the most unlikely of outcomes at the London Assembly, Reform have teamed up with Labour to vote in support of these aims.
Whatever your view on building on green spaces in London, at least remember this. Next time you take a drive, go on holiday or, heaven forbid, buy bottled water.
Take some heart in the fact that you will never be doing as much irreversible damage to the environment as the Mayor of London.
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