London scoping - ukcip

Final Report
106
London’s attractiveness emerges from its role within the UK as centre of government,
commerce, finance, other business services, the media, creative arts, etc. The sheer
concentration of these activities and associated resources generates its own momentum and
accelerates further concentration. London becomes a ‘magnet’ for many seeking their
professional development, family and friends, likeminded people, involvement in national-scale
organisations, networks, events and activities and so on. The ‘pull’ of London is therefore an
upward spiral – the more people are attracted because of these reasons, the more reasons there
are to attract others. The risk is that some set of circumstances might trigger a reversal of this
process, resulting in a negative spiral (as witnessed in the past several decades in many towns
and cities in the north of England). House prices, pollution, poor infrastructure, lack of health
care, crime and so on, could all contribute to such a reversal, though the underlying economic
conditions are likely to be the most important factors.
MORI’s survey work for the GLA over the past two years provides evidence of the
attractiveness of London. More people agreed that London had a positive rather than a negative
record for culture and leisure, tolerance, parks and open spaces, easy accessibility, good
relations between sections of the community, less discrimination than in the past, good schools
and accessibility for people with disabilities (GLA 2002). Only on three issues did London
score a more negative than positive record: availability of good quality health services, being a
‘green city’ and ‘clean’ city. The fact that 75% of respondents thought that London is not a
clean city is highly significant to this study.
About a quarter of MORI’s respondents were ‘very satisfied’ with London as a place to live and
another half were ‘satisfied’, only one in ten said they were dissatisfied. It is interesting to note
that a larger number of people are ‘very satisfied’ (about a 1/3 rd of respondents) with their
neighbourhood rather than with London as a whole. That could indicate the negative aspects of
being part of Greater London which are not necessarily so evident locally, or which are more
readily adapted to locally through familiarity and experience. On the negative side, when asked
whether their neighbourhood is getting better or worse, 38% of people said it was getting worse,
compared to 24% who thought it was improving (GLA 2001). The corresponding figures for
London as a whole were 47 and 19% respectively.
The perception of negative costs associated with living in Greater London (as opposed to the
respondents’ own neighbourhood) appears to be becoming more pronounced. Judging by the
responses elsewhere in the MORI survey, these negative costs appear to be crime and security,
cost of living, traffic congestion, lack of public transport and problems with public services
(health and education). Slightly more than 1/3 rd of respondents said that they would tend to
agree or strongly agreed that they would move out of London ‘if they could’. This is higher
than the 20% of respondents who, in a separately posed question, thought that they were certain,
very likely or fairly likely to move out of London. One interpretation of this is that 10% or so
of the respondents do not feel able to move but would quite like to if they could.
We should note that a major limitation of the use of MORI data here is that we do not have a
comparator data-set for other cities in the UK, EU and further afield. If we had had such data,
we would have been able to get a much better understanding of the relative attractiveness of
different cities, against which the impacts of climate change could have been evaluated.
Unfortunately, such detailed survey data is only available for London as far as we have been
able to ascertain. There are perhaps fewer incentives for those in London to leave the city than
residents of other parts of the UK because opportunities are generally higher in the capital than