As cities and towns are being rethought and revamped, Estates Gazette brought together a group of built environment stakeholders at UKREiiF to discuss the challenges in urban regeneration, the new thinking they need to show and the changing mixes of asset classes being brought into focus in new visions.
We asked each panellist to give us their five-year lookahead to what they hoped the impact of their role and work could be. Here’s what they said.
Hattie Charlier-Poole, senior development manager, Henley Investment Management
“I’ve spent most of my career either advising on, or working directly on, the delivery of large-scale masterplans at the early stages. Over the next five years in regeneration, what I would like to see, and what I hope I can contribute to, is the marrying up of the perception of what social value is and how that links to commercial success.
“At the moment, it’s quite embryonic and social value is something you potentially add on after you’ve secured the delivery of a project. But social value is how people are affected by the use of that development. If people are affected well, and their behaviour is positive, then the commercial success of a scheme is ensured. That feeds through to the schemes that I work on, in terms of early-stage thoughts around place making, public realm and connectivity.”
Chris Cheap, principal, managing director transactions, Avison Young
“I’m an unashamed office geek, so generally I revert to workspace. We have to find a way to keep the ‘open for business’ signs up in the prime office markets in most of our UK regional cities. It’s very difficult to keep an appraisal above water at the moment, for a variety of reasons, and therefore if we’re looking forward five years, we could have a serious undersupply problem that will create issues around jobs, inward investment and all of those things.
“We have to collectively get our big brains together and think about how to keep those ‘open for business’ signs up. I’m also deeply concerned about affordable and accessible workspace and where that’s coming from.”
Matt Cross, deputy director of markets and regions, Department for Business & Trade
“Our vision is about using our connectivity across all government departments, and our leverage – we have a minister partly in Treasury and partly in DBT – to create the next level of growth. Not sit and be constrained by the circumstances around us, but to unblock constraints that stop us from getting to that next level. To break through the risk of undersupply in the market of offices and of talent to feed into those offices.”
Mona Hassan, chair, Liverpool City Region Future Impact Board
“The pipeline of future talent is where my concerns and considerations are, in terms of regeneration. We have these ambitions that we want to achieve, but do we have the talent in the pipeline to deliver these schemes? That’s what we need to ask ourselves. If we don’t, what measures can we put in place to enable this to be bettered?”
William Scoular, head of business development, Investec
“Walking from my hotel through Leeds, I saw what I would call alternative use classes becoming mainstream investment vehicles. PBSA, build-to-rent are two and we’ve been behind a number of those schemes. Our role is to see those alternative investments becoming mainstream. I reflect on retail warehousing in the 90s and self-storage more recently. Will later living be a town centre alternative use that we will be supporting in the future?”
Tom Sleigh, chair of the planning and transportation committee, City of London Corporation
“In five years we will be, hopefully, a third of the way through our new City plan. We will have moved the conversation on from demolishing and building to retrofitting. We will retain our laser-like focus on providing high-quality, grade-A office space, for which there is insatiable demand in the Square Mile. We want to retain our place as a really attractive destination, not just for investors but also people under ‘Destination City’, our overarching strategy to make the Square Mile more than a place just to work.”
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