There are prosperous views looking west from the roof of what was once the London 2012 Olympics press centre and is now part of a commercial complex called Here East, whose best known tenant is BT Sport: straight ahead for the City and the Shard; look left for more big money towers in Canary Wharf; further left and much nearer, the Olympic stadium is a short walk away. On the other side of Here East, across the Olympic Park, lies Stratford town centre with its luxurious Westfield mall. But beyond that stretches the rest of the London borough of Newham, one of the poorest places in the UK.
Inside the Here East building, Newham’s Labour executive mayor Sir Robin Wales talked about jobs. He told a conference called Rising in the East that in the past six years the council’s job brokerage, Workplace, which began in 2007, had got well over 30,000 local people into jobs - people who had never worked or who had been unemployed for a long time. The secret, he said, has been to partner with local employers to help Newham residents to seize the opportunities the rapid development of this part of east London has brought - not just since the Olympics, but from the early years of this century with Westfield’s investment in Stratford City and the steady, long-term eastward shift of the capital’s economic centre of gravity.
Earlier that morning (Wednesday), plans for the expansion of City Airport had been approved by the government, following London mayor Sadiq Khan’s dropping of objections to it that had been made by his predecessor, Boris Johnson. Green AM Caroline Russell, whose party would like the airport closed, is dismayed, calling the decision “reckless” and “terrible news”. Clyde Loakes, deputy leader and cabinet member for the environment of Labour-run Waltham Forest, one of Newham’s fellow post-Olympic “growth boroughs”, deemed it “incredibly disappointing” and a “kick in the teeth” for residents of what he says is the third most overflown of the city’s 32 boroughs. Sir Robin, though, made it clear he was delighted: more flights means more business, means more growth, means still more jobs.
Another participant in the Rising in the East event, organised by thinktank Centre for London, was John Burton, Westfield’s head of development. He said the company had not moved in expecting the Olympic bid to be successful. When it was, the Newham mayor got on their case: “Robin’s message to us was ‘sort yourselves out’. He saw the opportunity for us as investors. Every time we had a negotiation with us, he left us with a very simple message: ‘I want jobs, I want jobs and I want more jobs’.”
But, of course, there are jobs and there are jobs and there are jobs. London’s Poverty Profile for 2015 showed that Newham’s unemployment rate, as a proportion of the economically active, fell by 1% to 8.6% between 2011 and 2014 and that during the same period the rate of workless benefit claimants dropped from 13.8% among working age people to 10.2%. However, between 2010 and 2014, the proportion of employees in Newham categorised as low paid rose from 25% to 35% and the proportion of low paid jobs done by Newham employees went up from 17% to 29%.
Between 2010 and 2015, Newham’s position in the league table of most deprived local authority districts according to the government’s index of multiple deprivation dropped from second to 25th place, only one notch above Islington (see page 15). The borough has produced a graphic mapping out the detail of this change. But some of it may be due to demographic shifts, as young, middle income households looking for relatively cheap places to buy move into terraced houses in Plaistow or shared ownership flats around the Royal Docks - they are “swarming in”, Sir Robin remarked. “The growth in zero hours contracts, insecure and part-time jobs limits progress,” wrote the LSE’s otherwise upbeat Anne Power in an early legacy assessment three years ago.
Newham is conscious that many of the jobs of longer established residents don’t pay very well. It says it is striving to raise skills levels among locals through tie-ins with employers and points to a recent initiative with Lloyds and property developer Lendlease to boost construction industry careers. Newham adds that it is pressing the government, as yet without success, to allow it to enforce payment of the national minimum wage. The council says it knows from its housing panel survey that nearly one in five of the borough’s residents in work does not receive it, let alone the higher, voluntary London Living wage.
Sir Robin expressed disappointment that Newham and other growth boroughs such as Hackney - whose City Hall-bound mayor Jules Pipe he credited with getting Hear East converted and occupied - and Tower Hamlets have not received the Games legacy support needed from post-Labour national governments. He did, though, say he was proud of what Newham has fought for and achieved. “No Olympic Games in previous history has made a difference to a poor community sitting right next to it,” he said, and concluded that London is the only Olympic city so far to have secured “anything like” a local legacy of that kind. “We can keep building on that,” he said.
