I recently attended a GLA roundtable to discuss the new draft London Plan as part of a consultation. The London Plan is the spatial development strategy for Greater London (read our series on the draft London Plan here). As such it is hugely influential; its policies guide development in a city that contains over 10% of our population and is a hub for much of the country.
Before attending the session, I revisited the draft Plan in detail. What struck me was the limited attention given to technologies that are already affecting how cities function and which will have a huge impact over the coming years. Topics such as micromobility, smart energy management, electrical grid optimisation and autonomous vehicles receive little or no consideration within the document.
It is always challenging for long-term planning frameworks to anticipate technological change but many of the developments above are no longer distant possibilities. E-scooters are now a common feature in cities; autonomous vehicle technology is being deployed in real-world environments and electricity network constraints have been a big issue across the development sector for years. These are not hypothetical future issues; they are realities that planning policy should be preparing for today.
To bridge this gap, local plans should include clearer policies on mobility and energy, particularly in the following areas.
Micromobility
A dream of any urban transport planner should be a technology that moves people from where they are to where they want to be, exactly when they want to do so. It should be quick, make no noise, emit no air pollution and be really cheap. There is no need to dream, we already have e-scooters, at least in trials although legalisation is taking too long. They will take some integration but need little or no more infrastructure. They can transform short-distance urban travel and their relationship with existing networks is important. Safety issues are real but can be addressed with design, geofencing and enforcement. Despite all of this, there is no mention of micromobility in the draft London Plan, except in the glossary. It should be as integral as walking and cycling with storage and routes.
Shared mobility / autonomous vehicles
The perfect partner to micromobility is shared mobility. A theme of urban planning is the car free or car-lite development. But even those of us who don’t need a car for work need one sometimes; for the weekend away, to collect a sofa, for work or to get to hospital. Car clubs could offer that freedom without the need to own a car and wouldn’t even need a subsidy; they just need to be supported and integrated. Despite this, there is almost no mention of shared mobility in the document and no policy requiring it on new development. The limited policy support and integration with TfL contributed to the challenges Zipcar faced. Shared mobility should be front and centre of all new development. Sometime ago I estimated that car parking in London took up the space of Camden and that could be greatly reduced if people were confident, they could access a car when they needed it without owning one.
Shared mobility is a good stepping stone to the autonomous vehicle future. Their trajectory is hard to predict, but the end result less so; once they are standard, they will eliminate the need for normal parking and reduce the need for the number of cars by somewhere between 75% and 90%. All new development should be designed to integrate that future well.
The draft London Plan does mention drones.
Energy policy
On energy policy for new development there is still a lot of discussion on heat networks, despite all new development now using heat pumps, making them somewhat of a non-issue. There are quite challenging targets to reduce heating demand, despite the fact that new buildings will already be well insulated and it will make very little difference to energy bill or CO2 emissions.
There is no policy on smart energy management. In the electric future, where we need to build more homes, data centres and renewable energy, what is important is how we manage electricity demand to make the most of the grid. Energy policies should be focused on employing smart systems to reduce peak demand and ensure flexibility. Microgrids are a much bigger opportunity than heat networks but are not mentioned at all. These should be the metrics of energy policy, especially as they will reduce occupant energy bills and accelerate decarbonisation.
On the hot topic of cooling in homes, there is still the drive to eliminate it through passive measures, although there is a growing recognition for its need in some cases. Passive measures can’t address 40 degrees Celsius, however, and models assume standard occupancies when in many cases homes are more intensively used. Cooling should be standard in city centre flats. The system could be controlled so that they cannot cool below a certain temperature, do not function when the homes are unoccupied or the windows are open. That would ensure the energy use is minimal whilst ensuring people aren’t suffering ill health in their homes. We still need to have good passive design, but we need to guarantee people can be comfortable in their homes and that requires cooling in city centre flats.
Our response to closing the gap between technology and policy
To be fair to the draft London Plan, almost no other Local Plan or strategic plan addresses these issues either. No regional or local plan has policies for micromobility, smart energy management or autonomous vehicles. District and borough local plans are still talking about heat networks and energy efficiency, and I have only ever read one even refer to smart energy management. These plans have 20 year horizons.
These issues will have huge spatial and cost impacts; a development with autonomous vehicles may need only 20% as many car parking spaces with all the additional green space or housing that unlocks. Scooters and autonomous vehicles may mean we don’t need a tram or bus extension, with all the cost savings that gives. New development as a microgrid may have a peak electrical demand half of that of a normal development, unlocking lots of housing, data centres or renewable energy connections.
We have developed our Placemaking offer to address exactly these kinds of issues. By integrating traditional masterplanning with technological understanding at the earliest stages, we are seeking to give clients developments that are less expensive, quicker to build and ready for the future we can see. We are deploying this thinking on new residential development and industrial and logistics parks, but without policy support it is difficult to implement; in some cases, policy can hold back progress on these things.
To plan better, we must include people from outside the normal process of plan making. At the GLA roundtable were civic bodies, charities, environmental groups and business panels. Perspectives missing were those of us working on AVs, smart energy systems, data centres and drone technology.
We need to make sure these perspectives are central in the formation of long-term policy documents and we at Turley are bringing that to the table with our blend of Planning, design and energy expertise.
Progress is possible
These issues are undeniably complex, and the rate of technological change is rapid and sometimes unintuitive. Still, we managed to replace millions of horses with cars, provide heating and hot water to every home and electrify entire cities; I am sure we can accommodate e-scooters, microgrids and smarter homes, most of which will reduce cost and require less space.
If we can get beyond “fabric first” and “encouraging walking and cycling”, and embrace autonomous vehicles, e-scooters, smart energy management and air conditioning, we will increase productivity, wealth, quality of life and speed progress on addressing climate change.
The day after the GLA roundtable Uber launched autonomous taxis in London.
For more information, please contact Barny Evans.
1 September 2026
