Old Oak Common and Park Royal are London’s biggest regeneration opportunities with the potential for 25,000 homes alongside millions of square feet of commercial space across 1,600 acres.
Turning that potential into a reality will be anything but straightforward. Uniting the three boroughs across which the project spreads with landowners including Cargiant, London & Regional and SEGRO, as well as securing the integration of government infrastructure projects such as HS2 and Crossrail, will be crucial.
EG asked newly installed chair of the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation Liz Peace about five key challenges the project will face and how she plans to overcome them.
How will you secure public and private sector funding?
“In terms of regenerating the sort of space that people will live and work in, I think the private sector should do that. The public sector should do as little as possible as they are not developers. Where they will make a big difference is facilitation – supporting and trying to get infrastructure into place. The challenge is always how to fund the infrastructure. The private sector should be making a contribution but what puts developers off is connectivity. It has become an attractive investment proposition, especially for pension funds who want a long-term return – but you need to find a way of creating an income.
“We want to engage in discussions with the Department of Transport, the Treasury and the Department for Communities and Local Government as there will need to find some creative ways to produce some value. This may include using things like enterprise zones, hypothecation of future business rates, income borrowing, investment, and grants. We’ve already done a huge amount of work in identifying infrastructure need – it is almost a bottomless proposition but we must do further work on our infrastructure plan.”
How will you cope with the 40% slash in your budget by the GLA?
“We are keen to be as efficient as possible. If the mayor feels we need to do with less, there are ways. If we can use the GLA’s resources, then we will do. There is some contingency money available. If the GLA says we need to come up with specific cases that seems perfectly fair. As it is public money, we need to use it very carefully. I think there are a number of different costs. Obviously there are our running costs and we can look at loans to purchase land but that, in the long term, needs to be self-financing. The GLA has also got interesting challenges in terms of housing delivery.”
How will the development meet the mayor of London’s affordable housing targets?
“We are a mayoral development corporation and bound by his policies, so we will be promoting these policies in the same way that he is, as far as it is feasible to do so. But if you talk to the deputy mayor for housing, he will be the first to admit that you can’t always get your full quota of housing straight away on sites that have all already been purchased – it is a trajectory. Getting the right range of development is going to be tough but that is the objective. I think the development industry knows that that is the objective and we will have to have tough negotiations with them.”
How will you attract commercial occupiers?
“Part of the debate is talking with landowners. We are about to agree Regulation 19, which is the next iteration of the local plan looking at what sort of activity you want on the site. During my 13 years at the BPF I banged on about the need to have genuinely mixed-use developments and build the cultural offering. We recently acquired a large grant from Heritage Lottery Funding to look at the cultural occupation on the Park Royal side and Park Royal is talking to people in Digbeth, Birmingham, about the cultural offering and what we can learn from Digbeth, where the creative industry has flourished.
We’ve talked about big-ticket stuff but in the meantime there is a quite a lot we could be doing in getting on with it. We have got a very well functioning planning committee with 816 homes in three approved schemes and approximately 11,000 in the pre-application stage. So, we are making progress on doing things already.”
How will you manage to devote enough time to making Old Oak and Park Royal a success?
“I have agreed with Birmingham [the Curzon Urban Regeneration Company of which Peace was chair] that it would be very difficult to do both. The Birmingham end of things is being handled quite differently. It is a single authority so you don’t have the challenge of needing to create a development corporation or even an urban regeneration company. In the two years I’ve worked there, we have had a big financial settlement from government and enterprise status which allows to you hypothecate future business rates. The local authority is more than able to progress themselves with the right stakeholder.
“But it is actually quite challenging being geographically distant from it. It is better to focus on a local person if they need a new figurehead. I don’t think it is a competition. They are entirely complimentary being on either end of HS2 – I think the challenges are different in both places. My real interest was in the Digbeth side and how you maintain the creativity that is there but it is relatively small scale compared with challenges in Old Oak. Were someone able to create 36 hours in the day and crack the problem of time travel, I would love to do both.”
To send feedback, e-mail Shekha.Vyas@egi.co.uk or tweet @shekhaV or @estatesgazette
