Brighton & Hove City Council is looking for ways to tackle its shortage of high-quality office space through a refresh of its City Plan.
An initial consultation on employment land has just taken place, supported by the Brighton & Hove Economic Partnership, a group of more than 50 individuals from the private, public and voluntary sectors.
Appealing to higher-wage employers
Brighton & Hove Economic Partnership executive director Gavin Stewart said the dominance of low-wage employment across the public sector and leisure sector in Brighton made retaining and attracting higher wage employers of vital importance for the city.
“We really want to be promoting and supporting higher-wage economies, such as the creative digital sector, because that’s where we’re going to be finding the jobs to be able to put people in,” he said.
Brighton has one of the highest business start-up rates per head in the UK – second only after London in 2021 – but Stewart said it struggles to retain those businesses as they grow.
“We lose people for two reasons – because housing is unaffordable and because there is a real lack of grade-A office space of the size people want to move into,” he said.
“At the same time, we want to ensure that we have the workspace to attract the big international employers that might want to come and locate here.”
Council “mismatch”
However, Chris Oakley, founder of Brighton-headquartered property consultancy Oakley Property, warned of a “mismatch” in what the council was looking to achieve and a lack of understanding of the commercial property market.
Oakley said the council’s use of Article 4 to remove permitted development rights in specific areas of the city was preventing the recycling of existing, older office stock in the city centre which is unsuitable for SMEs and often sits empty.
“That policy is not really helping to plug the gap between small offices and big institutional buildings,” he said.
At the same time, Oakley said several schemes around the city had ended up with too much ground floor commercial space, which had failed to let because the building is in secondary or tertiary locations away from the railway station and city centre.
He also warned that Brighton faced stiff competition from other office markets around the M25 when it came to attracting larger occupiers without local connections to the city.
“The council should be more focused on helping start-ups move into the right city centre locations, rather than on delivering 10,000 sq ft floor plates,” he said. “They should be more focused on working with what we have got.”
The initial consultation asked for feedback on issues including: what and where the opportunities are for new employment space; how delivery could be supported; how affordable business space could be brought forward; and how the City Plan could ensure that the right types of spaces are safeguarded from other development pressures.
Demand for office space
The work comes at a time of healthy demand and low vacancy for the Brighton office market. A report published earlier this year by Knight Frank put the office vacancy rate at just 2.4%.
Take up for the 12 months to 31 March was 137,900 sq ft, including deals to technology, media and telecoms firms Hyve Managed Hosting and Electric Square at the Circus Street development led by LandsecU+I and the city council.
Brighton also demonstrated its ability to seal big deals with an 85,000 sq ft letting to Octopus Energy at Edward Street, the redevelopment by Patron Capital and First Base of the former Amex headquarters.
Brighton & Hove’s City Plan Part 1 was adopted in 2016 and set out a strategic planning framework for the city to 2030, including targets for new housing and employment, and where new strategic development should go.
The City Plan Part 2 was adopted in October 2022 and sets out detailed policies for managing new development and further site allocations for development.
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