EDITOR’S COMMENT At this month’s EG ESG Summit, we asked the slightly provocative question of whether development was dead. We posed the question knowing full well that development, of course, was not dead. We know that new and fresh places need to continue to be developed, but that we just need to approach development in a different way. Maybe pulling down a building to put something shinier up isn’t always the right thing to do. Perhaps a carbuncle can be retrofitted to deliver more value – economically, environmentally and socially.
And that was the discussion that came out across various sessions at the summit – all of which you can read in this week’s magazine.
But then you turn to the news and I wonder, perhaps, if development is dead or at least dying. It is certainly getting harder and harder to deliver. Viability is getting tougher, rules and regulations and expectations of what is built – many of which I’m personally in favour of as well you know – are making it more and more costly. The environment is shifting quicker than it ever has before and then there is planning, which seems to be entirely unpredictable.
Let’s take a couple of stories as an example.
Last week developer London Square very nearly got knocked back on its plans to deliver 116 new homes in Twickenham, south-west London, some 58 of which would be affordable. Why? Because the borough wanted to protect the industrial land on which the homes were proposed. Industrial land, in a residential area, that has been vacant since 2017. Bizarre.
Luckily the planning committee went against the recommendation, instead deciding that more than doubling the volume of affordable homes delivered in the area this year was the right thing to do.
But that ‘will they, won’t they’ must be so exhausting for a developer.
And then there is the MSG Sphere in Stratford, east London. A proposal for a major new concert venue that has been in the works for more than five years. A venue that, while perhaps not to everyone’s taste and certainly not to Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s, could have brought new jobs, new tourism and a whole lot of revenue into London. Music tourism is massive. In 2022, direct and indirect spending by music tourists in the UK amounted to a whopping £6.6bn.
Perhaps the design wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, perhaps it would have caused infrastructure issues, perhaps the energy use would have been too high and the brightness would have caused health issues among the community. But perhaps sometimes, the income, the benefit to the local and UK economy outweighs that.
I know many of you wouldn’t expect me to go full capitalist, but sometimes – and in these times when we are desperately trying to build our places back up – we do need to think about the money.
Sphere Entertainment, the company behind the giant 21,500-seat orb, has basically told London to do one on the back of the decision. “There are many forward-thinking cities that are eager to bring this technology to their communities,” it said. “We will concentrate on those.”
Ouch.
Development really can’t die. We need it. It creates so much more than just buildings. It creates jobs, livelihoods, it creates atmosphere, a draw to a place. Yes, it needs to be thought through and sympathetic. But nothing is ever going to be perfect, so there has to be a call on what is better. Save industrial land or double your affordable housing stock with one permission? Put London on the global entertainment map and boost £6bn of spending to £7bn or protest against a funky design? Difficult calls to make.
Those calls are especially difficult, of course, for our under-resourced and overwhelmed planning departments, so it will be interesting to see if Jeremy Hunt’s announcement in this week’s Autumn Statement that local authorities will be able to recover the full cost of planning applications provided they make prompt decisions will have any impact. And if a strengthened Office for Investment and special concierge service for inward investment, as recommended in the Harrington Review, will cause local authorities to think differently on development.
To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@eg.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @EGPropertyNews
