From the terrace of the Crown & Anchor pub at Dell Quay, the wide expanse of Chichester Harbour opens in front of you. The view is backed by the South Downs National Park and farmers’ fields unfold behind.
It’s a fitting place to meet two women who are playing instrumental roles in the delivery of thousands of homes and millions of square feet of employment space in new communities typically carved out from the vast farmland portfolio of the Church Commissioners – including its nearby Chichester estate.
Joanna Loxton is head of strategic land, overseeing a portfolio of around 7,500 acres earmarked for development. Ciara Williams is principal rural asset manager, with eyes across an 82,000-acre portfolio which embraces food production, sites of special scientific interest, nature reserves and renewable energy schemes – as well as feeding the development pipeline.
The sensitivities that characterise the 6,700-acre Chichester estate – the national park, the harbour, the high-performing agriculture and the significant need for growth – are replicated and rewritten across its holdings (think Rochester, with its renowned salt marshes).
It makes for interesting asset management and an increasingly loud and influential voice on ESG matters. “Typically within our estates, we are effectively searching for where the most sustainable, suitable locations are for growth,” Loxton says.
Theirs is an organisation not known to shout from the rooftops – or church spires – about its work as a charitable body, set up in 1948 and now managing £10.3bn of diverse assets to support the work and mission of the Church of England.
But Loxton and Williams are keen to talk about their roles within this vast portfolio, as well as how the Church Commissioners intends to leave behind any last vestiges of a reputation for being “sluggish”, “traditional”, “faceless” or “passive” (their words) in its approach to real assets.
Leaving a legacy
Real assets make up about a quarter of the overall investment portfolio, covering farmland, sustainable forestry, strategic land, built environment and infrastructure, and was valued at about £2.5bn as of December 2022.
Loxton and Williams work closely together and stress their commitment to stewardship.
“We are very much directly involved in the developments we are bringing forward,” Loxton says. “Our legacy and the length and duration of our involvement in the land means that we are custodians.”
“We have been pushing very hard into a more direct involvement with stakeholders around both development and farming,” adds Williams, who meets face-to-face with the estate’s tenant farmers on a regular basis. “We have been moving towards being very much seen and engaging directly.”
The strategic land portfolio will deliver about 30,000 new homes, of which around 10,000 will be affordable. That should mean it is responsible for more new housing and communities than any other private landowner in England, the organisation says. Sites run from Carlisle down to Falmouth and from Kent up to South Tyneside.
“There are about 60 sites that we currently say are strategic land sites,” says Loxton. “That is anything with a draft allocation through to being delivered onsite.” These are “immediate-term” projects, albeit they may be delivered over the next 20 years.
“We then have a similar number of sites that sit behind in the farming portfolio, which we are working on collaboratively with local councils, with key stakeholders to try to feed the strategic land pipeline,” she says. “We’re doing the technical work and the consultation to try to demonstrate that they are suitable for development.”
Most are either entirely housing or housing-led mixed-use schemes, but the team is also delivering about 7m sq ft of employment space, either as part of mixed-use communities or purely employment sites. Projects are progressing in Exeter and Peterborough and a site is coming forward in Lincoln.
There’s huge variation in scale, from small, edge-of-village developments through to major master-planned new communities.
At Shepherdswell, Kent, the commissioners partnered with English Rural Housing Association to secure planning for 13 homes. Ten are affordable, reflecting the Archbishops’ Commissions’ vision for more affordable homes and stronger communities, as outlined in the Coming Home report on the housing crisis in 2021.
At the other extreme, a development of 1,100 homes on Church Commissioners land to the south of Ashford town centre in Kent got under way in 2014. Here, housebuilder Crest Nicholson built the homes under license. The new village, surrounded by water meadows, is now well established, with a nursery and primary school, footpaths, bridleways and cycle routes. The development includes a new vicarage to give a local church presence within the community.
Evolving approach
There are more and much larger schemes coming forward and with them an increase in the complexities of the work: when Loxton joined 15 years ago, there were maybe five sites in the portfolio earmarked for 1,000-plus houses; now there are 17. And the commission wants a bigger voice in how these are delivered. The aim is to make sure they live up to its vision for good housing to be sustainable, safe, stable sociable and satisfying.
It intends to put this into practice in the delivery of a large-scale new community in West Yorkshire, for example, where it has a scheme of 1,500 houses and 86 acres of employment land.
“We’re looking at whether that is something we do with a partner,” says Loxton. “We are looking at the commission’s role within that partnership and the fact that we would want a bigger voice and more say in terms of how the development and the new communities come forward.”
She adds: “We are looking at ways in which we can be more involved, while at the same time recognising we are not a developer and whichever partner we work with will have the expertise to bring these communities forward.”
This includes ensuring sustainability commitments made as part of the sale or tender process are fully met at the delivery stage and not diluted. Options being considered include joint ventures with master developers and retaining some form of ownership, such as key community infrastructure.
It’s a subtle but important shift from the relationship going back 15 years with Crest Nicholson in Kent. “Admittedly, the commissioners were seen as a bit more passive in terms of their approach to decision-making then. Looking forward, we’re looking at how we maximise our voice and how we maximise our involvement – particularly coming back to the strategic objectives of community curation and creating sustainable and vital communities.”
Loxton adds: “It’s not a wholesale change but it’s going to be a new and evolving approach. It’s work in progress. We don’t have much we can point to now as specific examples – but come back in 10 years.”
Aligned with this is a shift towards starting community engagement earlier and making this “part and parcel” of the process. Loxton believes it’s vital that “communities see the benefits and feel some agency in the process” – and as early as possible if delivery is to be sped up to meet the country’s housing needs.
“One of the things we’re doing as part of the ESG side of things is trying to formalise our approach to social value at the start of masterplan formulation,” she says. “That means starting to look at what the gaps are in the local communities, what the gaps are in facilities that potentially these developments could fill. We’re looking to start the engagement slightly earlier than we might have done 10 years ago.”
She adds: “It is tricky in terms of engagement. Quite often with local plans you don’t want to step on the toes of councils while they go through due process. But by the time we start consulting with communities, there’s always an identified site. It’s already set within a local plan and then you have the sense of people feeling like it’s too late.”
Those at the forefront of social value will be familiar with the balancing act.
“What we’re looking at now is, where do we start that engagement slightly earlier to make sure our proposals are grounded in local engagement and local need? But we need to remain very cognisant of – and sensitive to – the wider process with local authorities and not stepping on the toes of officers who are doing their work and the process they’re going through.”
Early engagement has been very much a priority in Epsom & Ewell. The commission bought Horton Farm, a 100-acre green belt site in Epsom, a decade ago. Working with the council, the commission achieved an early stage draft allocation for 1,500 net zero homes on the site last December. This was then included in the draft local plan, which went out to consultation in February. But the plans for Horton Farm and separate proposals for green belt land not owned by the commissioners have inevitably proven controversial and the entire local plan process was initially paused in March amid local protest. The council unpaused the process last week.
Plans for 2,200 homes on rural land in west Bersted, not far from where we meet at Dell Quay, have caused similar local controversy since they were submitted in November last year.
Both offer reminders of the torturously slow pace housing delivery often moves at. But there is progress too, with permission granted this summer for a 1,087-home development in Lincoln.
Hand in glove
Loxton and Williams have plenty of other things to move forward with. They are looking at how they can transition the portfolio to being low carbon, aligned with the commission’s commitment to achieving net zero for its investment portfolio by 2050. This is another way in which the strategic land and farmland portfolios are working “hand in glove”.
“We’re starting to look at how we knit together renewable energy projects and development sites,” says Williams. “It might not be appropriate to have renewables within a development site, but we’ve then got a wider estate that can deliver it and those two things can be intertwined. We’re looking at solar, for example, which might sit alongside future development.”
Selling away from the problem is not an option, she says. So rather than disposing of dairy pastures, the focus is on working with parties on new methane capture technology.
“We are committed to real-world change,” she says. “We’ve done our baseline work and now we’re working on getting the detail in with our stakeholders – for me that’s farmers and for Jo that’s housebuilders and developers.”
On the terrace of the Crown & Anchor, it may feel a world away from the “real-world” challenges of planning opposition, housing shortage and ESG. But for Loxton and Williams, they are all around us – and they intend to take the lead in being vocal about how we can meet them.
To send feedback, e-mail julia.cahill@eg.co.uk or tweet @EGJuliaC or @EGPropertyNews
