The only Tower in Church St Ward is Burne House on Bell Street, NW1

Latest figures from Census 2011 calculated by my colleague Cllr David Boothroyd shows that that the City of Westminster has some of the most densely packed wards in the United Kingdom (UK) including the top three spots in a table of Wards – Church Street, Harrow Rd, Tachbrook.

Church Street Ward, takes top spot but it doesn’t as such have a skyline of any sort, with over 11,000 residents in 43 hectares. It has one major Estate – Lisson Estate – along with a whole series of smaller Estates and street properties. The only Tower in the Ward is along the end of Bell St immediately behind Edgware Rd ( Bakerloo line ) tube station owned by BT, the ugly Burne House which lies largely empty! Furthermore, In the top ten mostly densely packed Wards, the City of Westminster has 5 wards including Bayswater & Lancaster Gate, so its not just the poorer wards. 

What’s this mean for its residents? Well it certainly makes for more intimate living than we have in the rest of the UK! More seriously its something we should take into consideration in the provision of both public services and other services in these Wards and should be of special factor in both. So for example in the provision of rubbish collection, it should mean greater concentrations of rubbish. And lets nor forget open space provision should also be of particular concerns as well, for those in those Wards.

What ever happens, some analysis of the implication to lives of our residents should be undertaken. So l hope to hear your views on how it feels to live in the some densely packed City in London.

Running along side Ali’s funeral journey to his final place of rest in Louisville.

When my father passed away in 2009 ( late Cllr Mushtaq Qureshi), I said the only other funeral I would want to be at would be Muhammad Ali’s one. So, when l heard he passed away on the morning of the 4th of June, l was ready to go the 4,000 odd miles to get to his funeral in Louisville, Kentucky, USA without hesitation.

For the simply reason that he is the greatest, as he had a phenomenal influence in the 20th century.  It wasn’t just confined to the sporting arena as the three times world heavyweight champion of the world, but also as a civil rights campaigner in the 1960s who dared to say “Black is beautiful” ; a conscientious objector against the Vietnam war which cost him his prime years in the ring; a poet and undoubtedly the first king of rap with magical lines like “I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee….” and not least of all a global celebrity everyone in the world recognised.

I think of him as one of the most outstanding individuals we are likely to see in certainly my lifetime and we’re not likely to see his like again.

When people talk about him it’s as if he’s their own, an uncle or a grandfather or a friend. Even my niece of only five years of age, talked as though her father and l were going to a family funeral when we set off for Louisville. She also told me Ali had died in early hours of Saturday morning.

So dare l say it was very much a spiritual pilgrimage for many who went to his funeral including myself.

On the way back to the UK from Muhammad Ali’s funeral, we heard of the appalling Orlando shooting from fellow passengers on my flight back to London via Orlando International airport last Sunday evening.

If the assailant was trying to derail the goodwill after Ali’s passing away he will failed miserably. While America buried its favourite son, as a proud Black Muslim, they watched for the first time by the tens of million the last rites of a Muslim burial. As Ali’s Jenazah in the Freedom Hall was televised live across the whole of the States on local TV channels, illustrating well Americans acceptance that you can be both American and Muslim in the United States. That is part of Ali’s legacy.

As we travelled back to London via the South by car from Kentucky to Georgia you could feel the goodwill in the United States at the pit stops along their highways. Ali was clearly accepted as an American hero. The afterglow of Ali’s funeral was having an impact well into the deep South. Personally l certainly didn’t feel any animosity aimed at me when l would have clearly stood out.

Interestingly as well, l didn’t have any difficulties travelling into and through the States. Given the discourse on whether Muslim travel bans or arms sale restrictions would have stopped the attack in Orlando it appears at least the authorities are managing this quite well without being intrusive.   

So, anyone who has any respect for Ali and his legacy, will stand in solidarity with Orlando & the LGBT community at their time of need.

That’s why as soon as l got off the plane and heard of the Soho vigil for the victims of Orlando shooting, l went to Old Crompton Street in the evening. The proceedings in front of the Admiral Duncan, it felt to me very similar to the vigil after the 7th of July London bombings in Trafalgar Square, another heartfelt vigil for many Londoners.  

This blog was published in West End Forum on the 24th June 2016 as their Forum piece. 

Here’s my speech on the night

I am not going to offer doom & gloom as the PM & the Chancellor with a third world war or a depression coming around the corner if we leave the EU. But you should take note when almost all Economists are concerned about the impact economically when its a profession where normally if you have two of them in the same room, you can expect more three opinions! Critically over half of them think that 3 per cent of GDP will be lost over 5 years, while the IFS suggests two years of austerity in UK finances.

As for the EU contributions its disingenous its suggest the £350 million when we have structural monies going to our poor area and it doesn’t acknowledge the rebate that Margaret “Thatcher obtained for the UK. For example much monies go to our poor areas like Cornwall and Wales and English farmers also now benefit from Common Agricultural Policy.

Lets also not forget the many benefits we have had from the Social Chapter and Directives for Workers Rights

• Paid leave
• part-time and full-time workers having the same rights
• Temp and permanent contracts being the same
•  Women having guaranteed maternity leave

We can’t rely on Tories to defend them, nor can with the BEXITERS 

As for sovereignty and power, the PM risks breaking up the United Kingdom, with this EU referendum, as he can not keep his Party together on Europe.

The Polls suggest, the Scots, Irish & Welsh will want to stay in, while English want out accept for Londoners.

As its not so much putting the Great back in Britain but having a disunited Britain afterwards.  

TTIP

Finally London has been a great beneficiary of EU labour into our economy.

You only have to look at Church St on a friday night, with Polish women servicing in the Seashell and the French bankers drinking around the local pubs. 

But we need to stamp out abuses like low wages and poor terms and conditions of work. 

Saying this, we have to remember that EU migrants are net beneficiaries to the tax system and very often keep our public services going. 

So its the economy stupid, don’t forget the implications to the sovereignty  of the UK and London has certainly benefited from EU migrants. 

Air pollution over Central London

The new WHO data shed light on the severity of the air pollution problem globally is it not time to have an 18th sustainable development goal, clean air for all. 

The WHO data shows that outdoor pollution causes more than 3 million premature deaths a year globally, more than malaria and HIV/Aids and is now the biggest single killer in the world. This toll is expected to double as urbanisation increases and car numbers approach 2 billion by 2050. Outdoor pollution has risen 8 per cent in five years with fast growing cities in the developing world worst affected.

Furthermore as the millenium development goals (MDG)  era came to an conclusion, world leaders last September ushered an era for the new agenda. Calling on countries to begin their efforts to achieve 17 sustainable development goals (SDG’s) over the next 15 years from ending poverty to protecting eco-systems.  But surprisingly no mention was made for clean air for all as an SDG.

The Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon stated at the time “ The seventeen SDG’s are our shared vision of humanity and a social contract between world leaders and the people. They are a to do-list for people and planet, and blueprint for success” Surely clean air should be added on the do-list. 

In light of such compelling evidence, clean air for all should be adopted by the UN as the 18^th sustainable development goal for nations to attain over the next 15 years.

After a million users of our pharmacies in the UK signed to stop the cuts to their services, the Prime Minister in response to a PMQ asked by a MP, that rural pharmacies should be protected. However he neglected to mention the fate of urban pharmacies in our towns and cities which is cause for concern. 

During the recent campaign for the Mayor & London Assembly l went along to my local pharmacy along Church St with soon to be Councillor Aicha Less, the Market Chemists ably run by Shiraz Mohammed, seeing first hand the excellent services run by the pharmacy over and above just drugs over a counter. Here l was told of the impact of the 6 per cent cut in the NHS for pharmacies by Rekha Shah and how the clustering argument maybe used to take away the services we have along Church Street market, having an disproportionate impact on London. 

The Prime Minister has expressed sympathy towards rural pharmacies, but I hope it isn’t at the expense of urban pharmacies we depend on. Some of them are clustered centrally, but that shouldn’t make the government think they aren’t valuable.

So while the government’s commitment to protect rural pharmacies is good news, it has remained silent on those operating in some of the most vulnerable urban communities.

I trust an elected London politician will take up their cause asap now that l am no longer at City Hall and in particular the Mayor of London. 

It was nice to see one of my local papers West End Extra sub-headline, that LABOUR’s SUCCESS is QURESHI’s LOSS after 12 years in office at City Hall as an Assembly Member (AM) but the real explanation is the D’Hondt formula. 

As the 11 London-wide Assembly Members are elected using a form of ‘proportional representation’. Votes from across London for the London-wide Assembly Members were added together. The 11 seats were then allocated based upon a mathematical formula – the Modified d’Hondt Formula. This took into account the total votes cast in the London-wide ballot together with the number of Constituency London Assembly Member seats that each political party had already won.

11 rounds of calculations took place to fill the 11 vacant Assembly Member seats, with the party or independent candidate with the highest result at each round allocated the seat. Seats won by parties were allocated to party candidates in the order they appeared on the relevant party’s list of candidates. This voting system was used to ensure the overall Assembly reflects how all of London voted. As the Labour landslide meant we gained the constituency seat for Wandsworth & Merton, l fell off the 11 elected London-wide Assembly, as l was in fourth place in the Labour lists.  

But rest assure that l will be back somewhere in the London scene. 

As a councillor in Westminster one of my jobs was to help people through the process of getting housed by the city council. 

One of the people I helped has since come back to me for assistance in purchasing their property under Right to Buy (RTB), and while I am no longer a councillor, I thought I’d take a look. 

What struck me was the valuation of the property, a staggering £500,000 for a 20 to 25 square metres bedsit. 

Well, that’s not surprising given that some of the developments nearby, like on Chiltern Street, are being sold for several million pounds for a two-bedroom flat!

It just goes to show how ordinary Londoners have been completely priced out of the housing market in the capital.  

Don’t take my word for it, we have had none other than Donald Toon, director of economic crime at the National Crime Agency, saying: “I believe the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. 

“Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK.”

Nowhere else has seen more skewing of the housing market than the City of Westminster, where a huge percentage of the UK properties bought by companies in off-shore tax havens are concentrated – with as many as one in 10 properties in the borough. 

More recently some 6,527 properties, in places like Pimlico, the West End and Edgware Road, were purchased by off-shore companies between 2010 and 2015. 

Dolphin Square in Pimlico has the highest concentration of off-shore companies buying up properties, followed by those in the West End. 

We’ve had children of the prime minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, buying up Park Lane and ex-prime minister of Iraq, Ayad Allawi, buying up properties along Edgware Road. 

Incredibly, similar off-shore companies have also started buying up ex-RTBs on our council estates, like Cooper House in Church Street ward. 

Now surely not all off-shore companies can be seen in this light, but you have to stand up and listen when a Transparency International report of last year, “Corruption on your Doorstep: How corrupt capital is used to buy property in the UK”, suggests that £180million of property in the UK has been brought under criminal investigation as the suspected proceeds of corruption since 2004.  

This is believed to be only the tip of an iceberg of the scale of the proceeds of corruption invested in UK property. 

Furthermore, more than 75 of the properties under criminal investigation use off-shore corporate secrecy.

Interestingly, while the so-called Panama Papers have kicked off the interest in these off-shore companies, most are not registered in Panama but in British Overseas Territories & Crown Dependencies like British Virgin Islands, Guernsey, Isle of Man and Jersey, suggesting where we will have to act on the issue globally.

So what’s the Mayor of London got to say for himself? After all, much of this has happened in his time at City Hall. 

At first he was in denial, before he acknowledged the extent of the problem last year in an exchange with me at Mayor’s Question Time.  

More recently he’s not been keen to support some of the changes proposed to deal with the problem, backtracking on his position a year ago. 

So Boris Johnson has let London become the world’s money-laundering capital and not acted to stop allowing the super-rich to use off-shore companies to buy property. Money laundered through London’s property market leads to hyper-inflation in housing prices for ordinary Londoners.

While he may not have had the powers to deal with it, he certainly could have been an advocate of reforms to the housing market, such as making it a responsibility of estate agents to check buyers as much as sellers in any property transaction. 

Given the influence of ill-gotten gains on prices, let’s certainly hope the next Mayor of London intends to advocate for these reforms and much more.

This was published as a Forum piece in the West End Extra in the week beginning the 27th of April 2016. 

President Obama was not just making a noise over whether we should stay in the EU or not but quite literately over Marylebone & St Johns Wood with his helicopters, aided with the Met ones as well over the past weekend. 

If you want hear for yourself what is was like over Sunday lunchtime in Marylebone, when the President Obama had already left, please listen below;

It has been like this on and off since President Obama’s arrival on thursday night! 

I for one will be looking forward to the US embassy moving South of the river but l am not sure if the US ambassador will move his residential home to the new site in Nine Elms as well.

If future Presidents of the US continue to stay in Regents Park, l just ask for some consideration of the noise caused by their helicopters over the park and thus neighbourhoods like St John’s Wood, Marylebone & Primrose Hill! 

Last week’s AGM of the Soho Society was meant to be a consultation for Crossrail 2 works under Soho. It turned out to be a much more contention affair as Crossrail 2 didn’t offer Soho residents any choices at all for the consultation, this after making out it was doing a favour undertaking it during purdah for the Mayoral & London Assembly elections! 

In comparison residents of Chelsea, have been given choices all the way through their consultation various stages and Crossrail 2 and the Mayor are having to respond to their petition concerning the Kings Rd location of the Crossrail station sent to the final London Assembly meeting of the term. 

The choice for residents has included also Cremorne Gardens and or not stopping at all through the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea at earlier stages of the consultations. More recently serious consideration is being given to moving the Crossrail station to Imperial Wharf as an alternative, in the adjacent borough with new housing consideration a key factor.

In contrast the residents of Soho at the Soho Society AGM were being presented with a “fait accompli” by Crossrail 2 as it insisted that Crossrail 2 needs to connect with Crossrail 1 at this point in Soho. An excellent point was made by one resident who asked whether before ploughing ahead with it, should not consideration be given to the actual street movement of people after Crossrail 1 is operational in 2018? An excellent point and we should also add the pedestrianization of Oxford St which both major Mayoral candidates are committed too as well during the next term ( 2016-2020 ).  

The very least Crossrail should offer is calling the new station after Soho Square, given all the hardship residents of Soho will have to put up with for another 10-15 years of building works immediately after the Crossrail 1 work ends! 

Investigations into off-shore company ownership of properties in Church St Ward, City of Westminster reveal very surprisingly that they have been buying up ex-Right to Buy (RtB) properties in council blocks. An example is Coopers House, St Lyons Place, NW8 where we have as many as 4 properties.

The City of Westminster has the biggest concentration of properties owned by off-shore companies registered in places like British Virgin Islands and Panama in the UK. But the investigation into Church St Wards shows its not been happening just in the posh parts of Westminster like Mayfair but also into local Council Estates. It must mean the private landlords are renting out these properties have found ways to dodge paying their capital gains taxes and maybe other forms of taxes.

 The data above was provided by Private Eye list of foreign owned properties in the UK.  For full details on foreign owned properties in Church St Ward, please see click here for the full breakdown Church Street property map