Victoria Hills of the Royal Town Planning Institute said that, beyond the headlines, the problem isn’t so much planning as convincing investors. Tools such as Mayoral Development Corporations and development orders are proving useful and offer simplified planning – so it might be that more fiscal incentives are required, along with the ability for public bodies to borrow more.
She said: “If I reflect on my time working for all three Mayors of London, the thing that really got development away was being able to borrow against future receipts. And it's the Treasury letting go - there is no way that [the newly redeveloped] Battersea Power Station would have happened without the Northern line extension, and the Northern line extension wouldn't have happened without the council being able to borrow against future business rates, which was underwritten by a deal with the Treasury.
I see no reason why the Treasury couldn't be a little bit more relaxed with letting local authorities borrow for infrastructure.” Only with serious infrastructure projects committed – and preferably utilities too - she said, will you get “serious developers around the table.
Duncan Cumberland of Muse Developments and English Cities Fund said that the projects he’s worked on around England have progressed in a “relatively politically agnostic environment” as everyone wants regeneration.
“In terms of the planning process and policies, we've found some innovative thinking while delivering big schemes such as Salford Central and Plymouth Millbay. There is an issue with planning resource in certain areas, but the picture’s not as bad for brownfield as many would say.”
Neil Murray of Impact Data Metrics highlighted the opportunities that come with brownfield sites. “Demonstrating to planning departments a holistic understanding of the neighbourhood and economy around any given site, offers real potential to create new developments that can have true impact. From big schemes down to smaller residential developments, there are insights that can be derived from accurate data. It helps to elaborate distinctive and differentiated visions for developments that make them more likely to succeed long-term.”
When the process works, it often produces spectacular results. “There are lots of success stories. Once things get going, they get going quickly. Once intervention comes early on and funding is secure, then the pressure is on us to deliver.
Rachel Laver of Marches Local Enterprise Partnerships, which covers Shropshire, Herefordshire, Telford and Wrekin, pointed out that some of her counterparts around the country have been key to getting projects moving outside of the core cities: “The Cheshire & Warrington LEP has several Enterprise Zones sites that work phenomenally well and has been able to borrow £30 million against business rates growth in those locations,” she noted.
One challenge in securing public funding is the tight timelines on new streams of money that appear, often as part of the Levelling Up agenda. “Suddenly, in the Marches two Local Authorities have circa a total extra £5 million to £6 million of rural funding to spend which is very welcome, but it’s a really quick turnaround on the application,” said Rachel Laver. “This funding has come on top of a wave of other funding initiatives, which all need applying for and reporting on separately, it doesn’t feel strategic.”
Matt Chandler of Godwin Developments felt that the systems could be deliberately designed not to be easy to navigate: “Is it designed to be a bit of rough and ready and quick, so people just fall by the wayside on their own - and then they just go back to the existing situation?”
Resourcing in the post-austerity age remains an issue for councils, creating a roadblock for development, said Rachel Laver: “Local authorities have cut and then cut again their regeneration teams. And suddenly, they've got more things being thrown at them. They can't properly consider them. So, you're going to get ill-thought through schemes - and you're also going to get failure.”
A situation where funding pots are reliant on ‘projects starts by x date’ when schemes aren’t even consented is asking for trouble, it was said. The best bidders are being allocated public cash, even without realisable schemes.
As Neil Murray said: “This is a problem, but people will keep saying ‘we’ve got to put in a bid, because if we don't, we miss the boat’.”
There’s always an element of crowd-pleasing politics at play from central government, reflected Tracy Gordon of the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority: “They want the big announcement, to say ‘look at what we're doing in the community’. But it's constant bidding for little pots of money here and there. With big brownfield projects you need certainty over a length of time, a coherent strategy.”
She agreed that short turnarounds on funding allocations are difficult: “We have six local authorities in partnership, so you’ve got to agree with six partners before you even start filling in the form. Then there’s technical information required, which is hard to get quickly.”
Rachel Laver added: “It’s great to see all these interventions, but I think it's better just to pause and be a bit more cohesive. None of this has helped to achieve actual Levelling Up.”
That cohesion in approach comes from a greater understanding of what’s actually needed on the ground and the best way to deliver it. Too often we hear Local Authorities say that they know they need to level up, but they don’t have the data that gives them a baseline to measure from.
Political ructions haven’t helped an area of real estate that wants certainty over a period of time. But as Victoria Hills pointed out, Levelling-up Secretary of State Michael Gove has championed brownfield development. Whichever way major projects are billed and repackaged, the key sites can find a way.
She said: “At the mayoral level you have some good operators like Steve Rotheram [Liverpool City Region], willing to work across the political divide because you need to get support. The mayoral layer is where the solution lays: a Mayoral Development Corporation provides a consistency and certainty, locked into a statutory body.”
Victoria Hills talked about Old Oak Common in West London, a new super transport hub, set to be best-connected and largest railway station ever built in the UK. The station will have fourteen platforms, a mix of six high-speed and eight conventional service platforms, with an 850m-long station box, big enough to fit 6,300 Routemaster buses inside. The station will have high-speed rail services to the Midlands, Scotland and the North, and access to central London and Heathrow via the Elizabeth line. Passengers will also be able to travel to Wales and the South West.
“It’s a classic example of the benefits of a Mayoral Development Corporation. Old Oak Common is a Boris Johnson project that although Sadiq Khan may yet to have fallen in love with, he couldn’t scrap. It allows projects to proceed quietly beyond the politics. They can’t be dismantled very quickly. It’s a more secure route of locking everyone into the regeneration story than anything else I can think of. If you look anywhere in Europe, this is how they do things.”
The mayoral layer is where the solution lays: a Mayoral Development Corporation provides a consistency and certainty, locked into a statutory body.
