Craig McWilliams’ headline in an article published in City AM earlier this week was an amusing play on recent words, ‘We’re going to build Crossrail 2 and the private sector is going to pay for it…’
The vice-chairman of the Westminster Property Association and chief executive of Grosvenor Britain & Ireland is resolute in his convictions that there’s no downside to Crossrail 2 apart from the £32bn bill, but does he have the answer? We think he does.
London’s east-west commuters stuff themselves into the stifling metal tubes of the Central, District, Piccadilly and Circle lines (which according to some sources exceed EU limit regulations on transporting cattle) every day. They will get some relief when the Elizabeth Line (first proposed in the 1940s but presumably under another guise) becomes fully functional in December 2018, but what about the poor souls travelling north to south?
The Jubilee, Northern, Bakerloo and Victoria lines are subject to the same daily overcrowding but hope is at hand with the development of Crossrail 2. It’s a highly ambitious plan to link north-east London from Tottenham Hale (and even slightly further out) to the traditional south-west commuter belt of Wimbledon. It will also connect Surrey and Hertfordshire to central London.
Alongside the original 19th century London Underground build and the Eurostar, Crossrail 2 represents one of the capital’s largest, most complex and most expensive engineering projects. It is backed by support from London mayor Sadiq Khan, TfL and Network Rail as well as business leaders including from the city’s biggest landlords Grosvenor, Land Securities, The Crown Estate, British Land and Derwent as well as, crucially, the public.
At a reported £32bn, it costs roughly the same as a potentially world-beating attacking midfielder from Juventus with a dodgy haircut, so what is London really getting for that money?
• 30 new trains an hour, beating congestion and meeting the demands of the creaking tube network
• An expansion of London’s rail capacity by 10%
• 60,000 jobs nationwide during the various construction phases
• 100,000 new jobs after opening
• Potentially 200,000 new homes straddling its length
• A daily disgorgement of 120,000 people on Oxford Street alone, a 40% increase
But at thirty-two billion pounds? The government coffers are already stretched to breaking point and it’s unlikely the back of the Downing Street sofas will yield anything like that amount, so where is the money going to come from?
While the government is currently considering the funding case, Craig McWilliams suggests that the project could be partly funded – to the tune of around £15bn by central London’s private sector. According to a report commissioned by the Westminster Property Association and authored by JLL entitled Crossrail 2: Catalyst for Growth in Central London, the shout is that about half the funding can be raised by unleashing the potential of central London.
He said: ‘Civic leaders with a placemaking vision should unleash the West End’s potential to deliver Crossrail 2. The economic case for this vital piece of infrastructure is strong, the benefits are national and the opportunity should be taken. Private sector leaders in Central London stand ready to make the case.’
It’s a bit of an abstract concept though. How does one unleash the potential of a city? Look around the West End and the City and there are currently more cranes than people so it’s not as if we’ve been sitting still for 20 years, but it seems we need to look elsewhere for development potential.
The report highlights suggestions for specific areas of the proposed route, for example in ‘the corridor on [the] route from Victoria to Tottenham Court Road and Euston for dense, well-designed, mixed neighbourhoods and commercial districts’. It also points out that the West End drives the success of London by supporting jobs and filling the government’s coffers with over 30% of UK tax revenues and if ‘government can commit to a funding deal for this new railway, the private sector can respond with new investment, and a greater share of London’s taxes [and local retention] can be used to fund this new infrastructure.’
Another issue to highlight is that in order to achieve the abovementioned type of intensification, there will need to be some policy flexibility in terms of height and residential use in certain locations inside the West End, described by the WPA as ‘the country’s most economically productive district’.
They went on to say that ‘this would help developments come forward that offer world-class placemaking, office, retail and leisure space, as well as the opportunity to improve the public realm in Central London and fund more affordable housing in inner London.’
Writing in mid-March before the issue of the report, Alastair Reed, Senior Policy Researcher at the Centre for Progressive Capitalism backed Crossrail 2 but asked the perfectly valid question ‘is it really fair for taxpayers from across the whole of the UK to be asked to pick up such a large bill for yet another shiny London prestige project?’ While this is by no means a vanity project, his point is sound. The success of London undoubtedly benefits the rest of the country and no argument can be made against the need for the horribly overcrowded tube network to get an overhaul but he also says, rightly to some, wrongly to others that while ‘London needs Crossrail 2, London needs to pay for it.’
And that’s precisely what London intends to do, or at the very least go Dutch with the government.
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