Financing the Northern Line Extension: the politics of governing Greater London

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the politics of governing Greater London by focusing on the financing of Transport for London’s Northern Line Extension. It argues that metropolitan infrastructure policy is a terrain for power struggles to play out. At the same time that the formation of agglomeration economies drives the fragmentation of political geographies, it also strengthens the authority of metropolitan governments, which remains subject to the jurisdiction of nation-states. Based on expert interviews and documentary analysis, this paper demonstrates that the Mayor of London pursued the Northern Line Extension to extract fiscal and financing capacities from the UK state. The office instrumented England’s first tax-increment financing to overcome the collective action problem hardwired into transport policy in the Greater London Area and harness non-sovereign finance for gaining more autonomy from the Treasury. Instrumentation, the paper concludes, has profound distributional effects within and between agglomerations, and therefore warrants further scholarly attention.