Cllr David Snowdon (Millwall Ward) outlines his views on the latest census figures.
The first results of the 2011 Census are now in, and have confirmed what we have all long known: the population of Tower Hamlets has been Britain’s fastest growing local authority over the past ten years. The population of the Borough increased 26.4% between 2001 and 2011, far outstripping the 7.1% increase in the population of England and Wales as a whole.
While it is always gratifying to know that people from far and wide want to move into our area, it is time to think again about the impact that this population growth is having on our local community. Tower Hamlets is now the fourth most densely populated area in the UK, and will overtake Hackney to claim third place any time now. At 12,845 people per square kilometre, we have 31 times the population density of England as a whole, which is already the third most crowded country in the EU.
The question is whether adding ever more people into an inner London Borough is the right thing to do: for the existing population or new residents. Tower Hamlets Council certainly thinks it is. The Council’s long-term Core Strategy document calls for a whopping 43,170 new properties to be built in the Borough by 2025, with 40% of these on the Isle of Dogs alone. According to the Greater London Authority (GLA), the scale of this development will see three Tower Hamlets wards (Bromley-by-Bow, Weavers and Whitechapel) enter London’s top 10 most densely populated by the time all the new residents move in.
Is this really what we want for our Borough? As an Isle of Dogs Councillor, my surgeries are regularly filled with people suffering from the effects of over-development. I know of Isle of Dogs families who have been given school places as far away as Aldgate, while nearly every week I am approached by local results struggling to park their car on their estate, let alone their own street. Unless Tower Hamlets Council, and Mayor Lutfur Rahman, quickly wake up to the fact that ever more housing can’t be built without investments in local social and physical infrastructure, we have a ticking time-bomb of insufficient resourcing on our hands. We need more school places, improved medical provision and an honest appraisal of how to cope with an increase in the number of cars on our streets.
This is not an insurmountable problem. Millions of pounds a year of taxpayers’ money could be freed up every year to implement these priorities with just a few simple acts. Scrapping the Council’s vanity‘newspaper’ East End Life would be a good start, as would bringing to an end the Town Hall culture of employing ever more ‘advisors’ and ‘consultants’. Axing the subscriptions to lobbying groups and ‘parliamentary consultants’ would add many tens of thousands of pounds a year to what we could spend on front-line services. Without this, I simply can’t see how a good quality of life for all residents, new and longer-term, can be maintained if the council wants to impose ever higher population densities.
Against this backdrop, I for one would not be celebrating if Tower Hamlets took from Islington the dubious prize of being Britain’s most densely populated Borough.
Cllr David Snowdon can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected]