How is this sustainability affecting local people? The sector needs tools for evaluating the effects of property investments on the social fabric of our UK communities. In the developing world, there has been progress in assessing social impacts, with tools such as the social return on investment measurement for the non-profit sector.
But developers and local communities lack a framework to assess the effects of development on the social dimension of sustainability at a local level.
Sustainable development helps to revitalise communities by providing jobs, promoting social and economic growth and creating attractive places that draw people into an area.
Investment in development can support wider regeneration goals, including improved access to products and services, and attract more investment into the community. It also has an important role to play in place-making as an element of urban regeneration, and in improving public space and neighbourhood areas, health, and community cohesion. And it also helps to create safer communities by bringing about a focus on crime reduction and combating anti-social behaviour.
Yet here we are in 2011 and we still have no accepted way of measuring the value or impact of any of the above. One might have thought that with the Localism Act in place and work well advanced on the draft National Planning Policy Framework, there would be some energy, urgency, and heated discussion. We have the “presumption in favour of sustainable development” but we have no common understanding of social sustainability. No debates, no uproar, nothing. No one cares.
Don’t get me wrong. A few of us out there – Business in the Community, British Council of Shopping Centres, Dr Tim Dixon at Oxford Brookes University, and a few others – are trying. Some big commercial developers, such as Hammerson and British Land, and some housing developers, such as Berkeley and Igloo, have their own frameworks for looking at the socio-economic element. But by and large, no one is interested in knowing.
A day on the South Bank
I was with my family recently on the South Bank, and it was a wonderful afternoon. What made that day enjoyable, for me and the throngs of other families, couples, teenagers and tourists, would not have been discussed or properly evaluated when planning applications were decided. No one there that day was focused on jobs or carbon targets or regeneration. It is the stuff that we, the people who use places, value most and the property industry can do best that never gets discussed, let alone measured.
I thought that the draft NPPF would prompt a debate about the topic at the highest levels of the industry. A shift in policy requiring investors to make their case individually to each local authority in order to open and operate their business would surely be a strong enough reason for the industry collaboratively to address the problem, as it addressed the environmental challenges over the past decade. Nothing – at least until the Regeneration Commission took up the cause.
I’ve spent the past seven years here in the UK trying first to promote investment in the UK’s most disadvantaged areas and then to get regeneration codified in national planning policy, only to see the whole thing thrown out by the new government.
Making a difference
I believe in the property industry’s ability to make a positive difference in our communities. I just wish it demonstrably cared about how to measure that difference. The Regeneration Commission’s initiative is therefore welcome and timely. Business in the Community stands ready to support it.
