Planning London’s future

Stop building tower blocks of flats. Have we learnt nothing from the pandemic ? People don't want to commute, we are working from home. We also want true 15 minute cities with work places near where we live, not a commute to the city.
We need to reallocate City offices to become residential, and we need to start building commercial, business, office spaces in outer London rather than the despised Tower blocks forced on us.
We also need to enforce meaningful green space creation in new developments and stop councils building on our public green spaces. LBWF be ashamed.

People working from home want to have green spaces where they can exercise in their lunch hour, or before/after work, and want the area to be safe to walk and cycle. Currently suburban areas are car-dominated, making them unattractive and unsafe to cycle. We need better provision to attract people out of their cars, especially women who disproportionately worry about driver danger, and to enable children to cycle safely to school. There should not be free storage for private cars on our streets, and local authorities should enable car clubs to set up, so that people own fewer cars. Cycle parking should be easy to see and use, convenient and secure and people with non-standard cycles should be catered for.

Where I live, City of London, offices are the main building use, and their workers the main consumers of all services in the area. The place has been very badly affected by working from home. The current rapid return, especially of young workers, shows how important is mixing, seeing people in person, joining others not only in work settings, but in adjacent food, social and entertainment venues. So please encourage the return to work in work settings ... cheap commuter fares, no strikes (what ARE they thinking?). (Buses could use culling, if TfL wants/needs to save money. Very frequent often near-empty services round here).

Things could get better by persuading the City Corporation that there are enough offices now for the foreseeable future and they should stop giving planning permissions for ever more and higher office blocks. They should arrange for far more affordable housing in the area for everyone, but especially for essential workers like teachers, police, rubbish collectors, health service people.

The GLA needs to reconsider the demand for London accommodation if, as is likely, remote working continues.

Property developers also need to reconsider space requirements. I challenged the size of rooms in a potential development recently (one open plan kitchen/living/dining room, one large bedroom, one very tiny box room and said to be a family home). I was told (I am not joking) that if the box room was being used as a child's bedroom, there was always the balcony or the communal garden that could be used. If you are going to work from home and have a family with two (non-infant) children then really four rooms in addition to the living room are required: say two separate reception rooms + three bedrooms, or one large living space + four bedrooms. But how many properties like that are being built - and when they are, how affordable are they?

Without action, suspect we will see many more families, working from home, moving out of the capital. Leaving much of the rest of Inner London for those who are young or old without living-at-home families or who are simply too poor to be able to afford anything else.

TfL will need to re-consider its strategy. If they can rely less on commuter income, where is the money coming from? And yet, at the same time, we are saying we need better public transport to ween people off the motorcar. How is this circle to be squared? We shouldn't be looking to tourists to bail the system out - London should be rethinking that too: international tourism (on which much of London's economy depends) should be discouraged in a world concerned with the depletion of natural resources.

Remote working will survive after the Pandemic recedes. Hybrid working will also continue to be the norm. Could grants be made available for converting small areas of a home to acknowledge this?
Transport cost and safety is one area that needs to be addressed. We already have a taxing system for cars - the cost of petrol, and this should be used as a way of encouraging people towards smaller and more fuel-efficient cars. EV's are not the answer - there are too many cars and history will probably see the rush to EV's as questionable. The problem is that tax on petrol does not convert into income for the local area whereas, for instance, congestion charging does - this is not a reason for congestion charging however, it is too much a blunt instrument and just encourages cars to skirt around the edges.
Better broadband and mobile coverage is essential for hybrid / home working.