Big ideas and heroic philanthropy are needed to keep children, families and low-paid workers in the city, rather than pushing them ever outwards

If you were a child in London, would you feel the city wanted you? Would you feel this was a great place to grow up, would you know you had a future here and that this was your home?

For millions of people in Britain and across the world, London is the most exciting, enlivening and liberating place. It is a place of economic wonder, currently enjoying a boom of magnitudinal proportions. But it is a tale of two cities. If you are a child born in London and growing up in the city with working parents, then when you reach young adulthood you are more likely to be unemployed than other young people in London, or in any part of the country.

London is not working for its children.

We are seeing children disappearing from zone 1. Ordinary working families are rapidly finding it impossible to continue to live in zone 2. More and more parents cannot afford to live in zones 3, 4 and 5.

Adoption is a journey that doesn’t end with a placement. I’m there for it all Read more

As our poor children, families and low-paid workers are being pushed outwards, outer London councils are bearing the responsibility for funding public services for the people central London’s property bubble displaces. If we allow the city to become ruled solely by the dynamics of the property market, then it will become a childless place – and a city without children is pretty heartless. We need to think about London as a whole, for all of its children and all its people.

Councils in London, like the rest of the country, are being asked to meet more need with less money. The market model that the voluntary sector has been shoehorned and cajoled into is not working. Tendering for contracts – and believing that if you’re good with money and run your organisation like a business then your future is secure – is not adding up any more.

The attempt to put public services into a market model in London is especially unsustainable because it costs more to run a basic service here than anywhere else. So even if the rest of the country can make its services more efficient and engage the voluntary sector through contracts and tendering, it won’t work here. Recent market analysis for the residential care sector (pdf) said that no existing investor, commissioner or provider, could envisage new children’s homes in London being financially viable because of the prohibitive production costs. That means that London can’t look after its children in care.



We need to think differently about how we are working together and collaborating across the public sector, charities, philanthropic funders and the business community. London is one of the wealthiest places in the world. It can’t be true that London can’t afford to look after its children, especially its poorest and those at risk of being abused. It can’t be true that we have no choice but to send London’s children away, to outer boroughs and other regions, to be cared for. Clearly we must organise our efforts differently so that we can afford it.

What needs to change? I’m inspired by the visionary, epoch-making, London-shaping philanthropists, like George Peabody, Lord Shaftesbury and Henry Tate – people who gave assets right in the heart of London for poor people and said: “You will always have a place in this city and this community.”

That’s why we have to fight the right to buy housing association property, but we also have to think of how visionary philanthropy today could help to lock children and families into London’s economy, rather than pushing them out.

We need some big ideas and we need some big heroic philanthropy in the equation. Here’s one idea: if London is the greatest economy, the best capital city and the most vibrant place to make money in the world, then let’s have the biggest, best quality, universal childcare service in the world, free at point of use for everyone who works here.

Ministers must do more to support kinship carers Read more

To do this we need to pool our resources better across the economy. At the moment we have public funds for childcare, and more to come, allocated through complex subsidy mechanisms that don’t cover the real costs of employment in London – creating more child poverty and low-pay problems because the people looking after our children aren’t getting paid properly themselves. Then there is the money people are spending on childcare from their private pockets – which for so many is already unaffordable.

But we also need to go to the business community, which is making a fortune in London, and have it pay its share for the world-class workforce they find here. And we need to think about putting philanthropic assets into making that promise a reality. A truly great childcare system would surely make London’s economy even stronger. It would definitely say to children that London is a place for them.

This article is based on a speech given during a London Funders panel discussion – London’s civil society: what needs to change in the next five years.