Wellbeing and Sustainability Measure for London

Everyone's situation will be different, hence everyone's pain and priorities will likewise be different. My pain is glyphosate weed-killer that causes cancer, and loud gas-powered leaf blowers being used from 8am when I work from home in Hampstead. Both ruin my quality of life and I want them banned or at least restricted. Germany, California, Washington DC, Vancouver BC already took measures - so why is London still behind?

Each area has a Ward Profile...
No idea how many wards in London however, certain information has already geen collated via these ward profiles over the years...
Surely this data could inform this initiative?
People get tired of being asked the same thing only to get the same results...
Homelessness in full view everywhere you walk in London
Overcrowding a huge continuing issue
Very little social housing
Affordable housing...for who is that affordable?
Young people's unemployment rates in London sky high ...twice for young people of colour !
I could go on
I think we all know what needs to be done...choose any of the above as a key priority & change the narrative.
Then get back to us

As much as on paper the writeup - cores and values appear sound - but what is on ground is far from the desire to implement them. For example, a core measure of wellbeing is stated as 'Accessible and Affordable transportation', which is correct. However, on ground, London mayor is planning to cut down the number of buses on quite a few routes - how does this help matters?

I honestly don't think you can separate values in the way you've done, and I don't think it's been separated very thoughtfully.

for example, the idea that a warm home in winter is not a core value deprioritises older people and those with certain disabilities - if these people aren't at the centre of London's 'core' values, what does it say about our governmental and social priorities?

similarly, we all want to be safe! but many people don't have that luxury simply because of who they are, and it doesn't matter where they go. so what's the solution? because the government's answer up to this point tends to be a stronger police presence in areas of financial deprivation, and we know that that makes things worse! surely safety starts with education (in and outside of schools), well-resourced and inclusive mental health services, and poor people not having survival dangled over their heads constantly. safety isn't throwing a group of state-appointed, power-hungry authorities with batons at the problem and criminalising the poor. empower communities to meaningfully look out for each other! widen access to self-defence training! and for f*ck's sake stop taking more and more away from poor people and then wonder why people are miserable and desperate!!!

Thanks for this. The division into ‘core’ and ‘strengthening’ measures makes sense to me. I was homeless in Lewisham with bad mental health and now I am in a safe, peaceful home with regular therapy thanks to local services. It’s a slow process but the support is really helping, thank you.

Landlords should be required by law to maintain their properties including the gardens. So many properties in London are rented out, and not properly maintained. The gardens are a mess. The buildings are falling apart. Landlords sit there gathering all the money from their tenants and do not reinvest any of it in maintaining the property. To give an example, I live in a block of flats. Someone who owns one of the flats in the block, and rents it out, does not pay the service charges. As a result, our block and garden is not properly maintained. She was taken to court, which ruled that she owes £15k+ in service charges. She still hasn’t paid. The court can’t do anything to enforce this because she lives abroad and none of the property in the flat is hers. It is affecting my mental health and that of all the other people living in this block. I imagine this is a common problem across London.

I dont understand the rational to have core and strengthening categories unless the focus is linear with priority to core? I believe equal priority should be given to both categories, because the needs of today and the needs a year down the line will be very different. The UK and London productivity debate has been raging for decades, and this is the same. Most of the focus is going on the grassroots/core, with no progression ladder for those on core level. Until you have this in place, given that the standards and aspirations are rising the bar for core will be higher than today and so by that logic, the focus will always remain on "core". This is why much of the best talent, the best businesses and the leaders tend to be poached by better locations and destinations. If you can afford to be rise above core, you will move to a place where the services offered are better and the quality of life is better. Therefore London will never progress based on this logic. If the plan is to enable Londoners to get to a basic level from which they can migrate to a better place/area, then this plan is very good plan.

Honestly, more money wasting. The national statistician was tasked by Cameron circa 2014 to devise a national wellbeing measure. The Legatum institute devised theirs....goodness knows how may since. This is a joke of an exercise. No real value arises from self-reported measures of wellbeing which are notoriously topical (if a survey runs the week after a woman is murdered in a park suddenly 'safety on the street' overtakes 'dog fouling' at the top of the list of priorities, then dips again etc).

It really feels like this exercise is either to
a) create a legacy action (ie in the hope that if it starts under the current Mayor it will be continued when he is not in office, forming part of his 'legacy' or
b) a source of multiple measurable 'outputs' that the Mayor (or others) can turn to find supposedly evidence 'improvements' (hey the people of London have had x% increase in the sustainability of their local environment in the last quarter - isn't the Mayor amazing!!!!)

I honestly doubt the general public has any idea just how expensive it is to develop and run this sort of measure - its horrific.
Why not put your time and energy into real, useful analysis of pertinent data that is only there if you ask - how many Londoners have diabetes, how many have poor literacy, how many cannot afford to heat their homes etc

Stop the destruction in our area of perfectly good family homes to be replaced with larger mansions.

Stop the loss and concreting over of entire front gardens to accommodate ever larger vehicles

Impose higher parking and congestion charges the larger the vehicle

Stop cutting grass verges in the growing season and allowing trees (even those with TPOs) to be removed and pollarded with ease.

You have covered biodiversity and pollution (to a limited degree) and more outside space etc etc. But no mention about the number of building sites and demolition of perfectly usable building. I live opposite 2 such building sites. 2 large buildings, 1 only completed in 1990, but now deemed 2 small and by demolishing and rebuilding with 3 more floors this will a) produce more income and b) cause me loss of light to both my home and solar panels. I realise this is just 1 small area in 1 small street but it is a borough wide problem. Turn a corner and you are faced with yet another building site. How many of these are for homes? None near me. All office space. I wonder how much will be used as people have now discovered the joys of working from home. Not to mention the carbon footprint of all this re-building. Has it been taken into account? I think not. The developers won’t mind paying a small percentage of their budget to plant a few trees somewhere that doesn’t impact the area they are building in.
Transport : how can you encourage people to abandon their cars and use public transport and then start reducing the bus service by 20%?
End of rant

I think there is a great ambition here - to measure our activities and society in terms other than GDP (Gross Domestic Product). GDP wholly ignores ALL social and environmental costs. In fact, GDP growth as a measure of "success" actively promotes losses in Social and Natural Capital. So this is a good idea, but 2 big problems here:

1. Totally confused logic: This diagram mixes processes ("gaining qualifications", "being ready for school", "reducing carbon", "can influence local area"...) with outcomes ("Good quality housing", "affordable housing", "Secure employment", "good physical health"...) with perceptions ("satisfied with local area", "a worthwhile life", satisfied with housing"...)

If the aim is to produce a "measure" surely this needs to target OUTCOMES (as GDP does). The processes are how we achieve them, and the perceptions are our opinions about them.

2. "Sustainability": We are SO far past the need to be "sustainable". If we aim to "sustain" our activity we lock in current pollution, degradation, resource use, "waste" CO2 emissions, soil loss, biodiversity loss, social disfunction, healthcare outcomes. To avoid catastrophic tipping points in climate, biodiversity, (and therefore economic and social outcomes) we MUST urgently become REGENERATIVE. "Sustaining" let alone merely "Sustainable" (i.e. the "ability to sustain") is not a remotely viable option.

It feels unclear whether this will be implemented/measured at an individual, commumity, borough or London-wide level. At an individual level, wellbeing and sustainability is an odd combination, but perhaps that makes more sense at a different scale. However, most of the measure reads as an individual experience of a place. If it is thinking about commumity-level wellbeing and sustainability I think there needs to be more attention on more macro measures (e.g. functioning services, levels of need being met, networks of support, development of circular economy)

This exercise may create a 'vision' for what London should be, but it is so distant from the current reality in so many respects that it is hard to see how to begin to make the radical modifications that would be required. It's not clear how to turn this into an action plan. So much of this vision is constrained by inter-connected nationwide obstacles, over which we now have little room to manoeuvre -- eg, our Victorian infrastructure, planning laws, a raging property market, a compromised NHS, inefficient rail services, inadequate staffing at stations and airports, low-paid employment, etc.

As other respondents have pointed out, other European cities are getting these things right, eg, Amsterdam, Geneva, even Madrid. I would not include cities that were bombed flat in WW2, because they had the massive advantage of replanning everything from scratch. London was extensively bombed, and took the opportunity to demolish the docks and sub-standard housing and plan Canary Wharf and beyond from scratch, but in the City and West End a less ambitious approach was implemented, due in part to evident need to conserve heritage and character, so we remain with the Victorian infrastructure and all its implications.

There are political solutions to several of the constraints, but they require bold political and financial commitment at a time when government is in urgent need of funding for "levelling up" with the underperforming areas of the country. But can we agree what to do in practice? Could the Battersea Power Station development have helped solved the housing crisis if 50-75% of the newbuild had been mandated and enforced through to completion for affordable housing? Should the money spent on Cross Rail have been better spent on rebuilding the NHS? Would different taxation policies make it possible to have BOTH? There's a vision.

London is overcrowded. Instead of building ever more high-density developments, more parks and water features throughout must
be created. Paris or Berlin are by far superior to London in that respect. In fact, I witnessed on a visit to Paris last month that even women pulled out their purses in the middle of the road to give money to beggars. Paris has a wonderful street life, and beautiful parks, even directly under the Eiffel Tower. Berlin, as Paris has water, greenery and a decent street life. London has tall glass and steel buildings with concrete roads around them (e.g. Shard, London Eye - awful) and - of course - chairs on pavements and noisy roof terraces, all surrounded by concrete.