Just the Ticket for a Global City? Evaluating the Role of the Mayoral Community Infrastructure Levy in Developing London's Crossrail

Abstract

Global cities are increasingly developing large transport infrastructure projects to maintain their competitive advantage, but funding these projects is challenging. Land value capture (LVC), which harvests financial contributions from property development, has become one means of providing some of this funding. LVC is however a complicated proposition to utilise and requires careful decision making to ensure sufficient revenue is appropriately raised without hampering efforts by the development industry to bring forward new schemes, or local, borough authorities can extract revenue to pay for their own infrastructure needs like affordable housing. London’s Crossrail has made extensive use of LVC funding through MCIL (the Mayoral Community Infrastructure Levy) which has to date raised over £1b of funds. In this paper, we critically identify the extent to which MCIL has been successful, drawing on Marsh and McConnell’s (2010) framework on the different ways projects can be considered a success.

Keywords: Major transport infrastructure projects, land value capture, Policy Evaluation, project financing, City Governance, London