April’s edition of Prospect has quite an interesting lengthy interview with Ken Livingstone, in which he sets out his views on quite a broad range of issues facing London. It also has a range of other associated articles, including a plea from Simon Jenkins on behalf of the rights of London’s ‘villages’, and a case from Andrew Adonis for the reformed House of Lords to be based in Manchester.

Ken is, as we know, keen to meet the housing crisis and demand for places to live, by increasing housing density in London to the levels of Paris and Madrid, including by building more very tall buildings. He is right that London is much less dense in terms of housing than other major European cities, but I don’t agree with him that piling more properties into more intense developments is the answer, or what Londoners want. He claims it can be done by “having intensive development around transport nodes, which can be medium rise, the sort of stuff you’ve got in Kensington and Notting Hill”. But that isn’t the way it’s coming out around where I live, where his high targets for intensity in new developments means some quite heavily over-developed proposals, which face serious opposition from local people. He’s right that the sorts of buildings you build are as important as the density statistics, but sheer intensity is also a crucial part of the picture too.

Ken also repeats his oft-stated view that the 33 London boroughs are simply too small, and they should be merged into five super-boroughs - his latest proposal seems to be that they should each be “wedges”, reaching out right from the centre of the city out to the edge. Although my natural instinct is for decision-making to be devolved to as low a level as possible, there certainly is a case to be made that existing boroughs (particularly some of them) are too small, and I think it’s quite fair to have the debate about which level can best exercise which powers. I don’t think he has much chance of winning this argument, however - and indeed he has already lost it on more than one occasion over his seven years as Mayor.

The most interesting idea he has, however, which I haven’t heard before in quite this form, is that the closest administrative unit to London’s natural communities are the wards, and that therefore each of the 625 wards in London ought to have its own ‘community council’. If I understand him correctly, his idea is that the community council should meet to discuss issues such as local crime, issues concerning local schools, and planning applications, but that they should not generally take powers in delivering services away from councils - apart perhaps from a small budget of £100,000 each for local project.

I think this is an interesting idea. Central government’s proposals for local devolution at the moment seem to be centred around self-appointed groups, which as far as I’m concerned is thoroughly anti-democratic, and flies in the face of the notion of accountability. And it seems to have been generated mainly as a way of keeping local Labour activists, frustrated that they have no input, happy and quiet. An elected community council, somewhat larger than just the three councillors that each ward currently elects, would be a much better idea.

And I think the sorts of things that he envisages them discussing are also about right. Simply giving responsibility for quite complex service delivery arrangements to extremely localised areas can be quite difficult - and is also often difficult to square with the obvious economies of scale that delivery of services in London really must take advantage of. But setting up community councils to discuss and advise, rather than manage services, at least as a starting point, seems to me a very sensible proposal.

This idea is only given an line or two in the interview so maybe I have misunderstood exactly what he was proposing, but anyway this is how I think this ought to develop!

The interview also has a couple of revealing lines about the nature of the role of Mayor and especially of a council group leader. Challenged that compared to his seventies and eighties self, he seems to be only interested now in cultural equality (race relations and gay rights, for example) compared to economic equality, he retorts quite sharply that that’s only because as Mayor he has no power over the latter, and if he did, we’d see a different picture! Anyone who thinks Ken has become quite a soft and cuddly Mayor in his old age should remember this.

And he says too of his current role that “I just have to make sure that my budget goes through the assembly once a year - and in the rest of my time I look outward, using the prestige of the office to broker deals with the government or the private sector.” But what’s really interesting is how he says this compares with his previous role as the leader of a Labour group on a Council (the GLC), when “my job was the day-to-day management of the Labour caucus”. After seven years working for the Leader of a Council perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but it does seem a bit extraordinary that he thought almost his whole job was not about considering the needs of London but gluing his group together.