Shaping the future of the Queen Elizabeth Park - 20/1/2012

Much of the London Olympics attention thus far has been on the buildings. But a breakfast talk given this morning by some of the designers responsible for the park at the east London site showed that the landscape features will be just as exciting, and a major part of the wider area’s legacy.

Eleanor Fawcett, head of design at the London Olympic Park Legacy Company explained that the park is ‘in the DNA of why the Olympic site was chosen’, and is intended to reach three targets: to build local ownership, attract regional visitors, and promote sport and healthy living. Split into two parts – the north park and the south park, each has different characteristics, with the overall intention to model the popularity and general ambience achieved by places like London’s South Bank. But with both north and south, said Fawcett, the key was to capitalise on this post-industrial part of London, playing with the juxtapositions between the pastoral elements and huge infrastructure, embracing the energy and its ‘unique moments’. ‘It has to feel great on a wet Tuesday afternoon in February, a place where everyone wants to spend time’, she said.

The North Park is the greener, more natural environment, while the South will be a more urban setting, framed by the Olympic stadium, Aquatics Centre and Olympic concourse. Grace Tang, Associate at James Corner Field Operations – who also worked on Fresh Kills in New York – explained that this southern element will consist of four ‘frameworks’ – the arc promenade, planting ribbon, hedgerow, event rooms and lawns and gardens. The 10m wide arc promenade is a linear place meant for strolling, with kiosks, food markets and parades; the planting ribbon is a flexible space inspired by the English country landscape, with perennials to cypress hedges and hawthorns and grasses; Event Rooms are set up for different scales of events, from a play feature for kids to a large concert; and the lawns and gardens include more passive picnic lawns, perhaps with a sculpted element. It also includes a modest centrepiece park hub building designed by Make Architects.

The North Park, by contrast, explained Jennette Emery-Wallis, Principal, LUC, and Barbara Kaucky & Susanne Tutsch, Directors, Erect Architecture, is based on a masterplan ‘like an unfolding leaf’, with an ecological narrative. Again with another hub at its centre, the park includes play areas, birch woodlands, ‘ephemeral dens’ and hiding places for children, log areas for biodiversity, and sand and water play elements ‘letting children be water engineers’ and a rock landscape.

Balfour Beatty has been appointed to look at maintenance issues, while the use of the waterways at the park is another piece of ongoing work. Fawcett said she hoped that the park hubs would be open the minute the public set foot in the park, with the other elements coming onstream on a rolling basis from 2013 onwards.             

Speakers at the event were:
Eleanor Fawcett, Head of Design, The Legacy Company  
Jennette Emery-Wallis, Principal, LUC  
Barbara Kaucky & Susanne Tutsch, Directors, Erect Architecture    

By David Taylor, Editor, New London Quarterly

London should ‘pull together’ to weather economic storm - 18/1/2012

London faces stiff challenges in 2012 across most sectors, largely due to the fallout from Europe’s wider economic uncertainties. But the development community can grasp opportunities from the Olympics and pull together to forge innovation, even from limited finance.

Those were the key findings of the latest meeting of the NLA Sounding Board, an elite panel of thinkers and practitioners from the world of architecture, planning and property development.

In his presentation at the event on Tuesday, the LSE’s Tony Travers said that the capital had been paralysed into uncertainty, along with much of the rest of the country, now approaching a double-dip recession. That uncertainty is feeding through into the London economy, although a more optimistic small indicator is that tube and bus ridership is rising, he said.

There is no shortage of equity available, but a paucity of sites available for development, said Stuart Robinson of CBRE, looking at planning in the run up to the publication of the NPPF, expected, he said, in March. The public sector he added, has got rid of people and held onto assets, the big example being hospitals, which could take advantage of development opportunities. Robert Gordon Clark said that the NHS has some 13 sites it wishes to dispose of, of over 0.25 hectares across London – the largest 3.75ha –and 2,000 staff looking after its property interests.  

The current environment is a difficult one for commercial development, said Land Securities’ Colette O’Shea, with banks tightening their lending and the only investment being from abroad dwindling once those investors learn of the vagaries of the UK planning system. ‘I’d go so far as to say there is virtually no cash available for commercial development’, she said. The residential market in central London is good but rate of sale is slowing comparatively to 12 months ago. There needs to be more collaboration between funder, local planning authorities and occupiers, with ‘more of an understanding that we are in a difficult world so all have to pull together to make things happen, drive jobs and the economy.’

The creative industries represent the future of London, said Derwent’s Richard Baldwin. Argent’s Robert Evans agreed, remarking that the opening of Central St Martin’s was changing the type of interest coming in regarding the King’s Cross site. Ralph Ward, presenting a guest paper on regeneration offered one reassuring insight when he said: ‘There is always money to be found somewhere for good projects, and it seems to me there is money to be made in London in the longer term’.

On transport, the recent government decision to green-light High Speed 2 was an encouraging step, although some on the panel questioned why investment in maintenance and upgrading the existing system had not come first, with others signalling their concerns that HS2 might not happen at all. But Old Oak Common represents a significant opportunity to ease the interchange and perhaps become a ‘Canary Wharf 2’, alleviating possible problems of hold-ups for travellers at Euston, a station which will also be the subject of redevelopment. HS2 also offers the possibility of ‘opening up’ areas such as Willesden, North Acton and Hammersmith to social and economic change, said Pat Hayes of Ealing. The Chelsea-Hackney line is another long-term proposal Transport for London wants to see delivered, said Alex Williams, and will be cheaper to build than Crossrail.

Matthew Butters of Pascall + Watson introduced a paper on air travel, saying that Government had showed it had little in the way of aviation policy – excepting the news that PM David Cameron will look at a feasibility study into a new airport – including Boris Island – for the capital.  Government projections have aviation growth rising for the next 30 years. But the problem exists now; coming up with a solution in 15-20 years will be too late – ‘the traffic and the business will have flown away.’

Finally, Sarah Weir offered an upbeat finale with a look at the legacy of the Olympics, plus a plea to make the Olympic Park a zone two rather than zone three destination. The ODA has commissioned a report called ‘square pegs in round holes’ looking at the unprecedented commissioning of pop-up spaces and art projects in an Olympic Park, as is happening in London. ‘Personally’, she said, ‘I think we should keep on putting square pegs in round holes so we don’t have the homogenous space that cannot make the most of itself.’    

David Taylor, Editor, New London Quarterly

Meeting London’s carbon reduction targets - 16/12/2011

Londoners need to get to grips with using their buildings more efficiently if we are to meet tough carbon reduction targets as laid down in the London Plan.

That was one of the main findings at a special half-day conference on the issue at the NLA, held on 9 December.

The conference heard that simple, commonsense measures employed by commercial building occupiers – such as turning computers off at night, using LED lighting and attending to temperature controls – could make a significant contribution.

The new London Plan has confirmed tough carbon reduction targets for the built environment, as the Mayor looks to achieve a 60 per cent reduction on carbon dioxide levels by 2025 and meet his vision for London as a ‘world leader’ in tackling climate change, reducing pollution, developing a low carbon economy, and making better use of resources.  From 2016, all new residential buildings will be expected to meet zero carbon standards, with all non-domestic buildings following from 2019, while London’s existing building stock will also require significant adaptation and renewal. The development of decentralised energy systems and energy generated from waste, will also be key to decarbonising London’s energy supply.

David Collier, Energy and Sustainability Manager at Broadgate Estates, manages properties across 23 sites, many in London, with close to a £30m annual bill on energy.  ‘It’s far more difficult to retrofit solutions to existing buildings, but one thing we can all do is improve our demand management, especially during peak periods of demand on the national grid’, he said. ‘The general consensus is that energy prices are going to up, so reduce your consumption and you will reduce your exposure to that volatility.’ Collier added that there is also growing evidence to support the correlation between better energy management and staff wellbeing. Anecdotally ‘it certainly provides a nicer, more predictable working environment’.

We can halve the demand ‘by using things less’, double the efficiency of what’s left, and halve the emissions in the energy supply, said Collier. Techniques such as voltage optimisation, energy efficient lighting, such as LEDs to reduce cooling load, using software to regulate out of hours energy consumption and server virtualisation are effective tools in the battle to hit the targets. Common sense disciplines like turning computers off at night and reconsidering running water chillers all day long are also useful measures, along with many more to be found on the Carbon Trust website http://www.carbontrust.co.uk/Pages/Default.aspx. ‘Reducing your demand should always come first’.

Sunil Shah, Head of Sustainability at DPP agreed, saying: ‘While you can have a low carbon building that’s being delivered, one thing that is recognised is the performance gap between an as-built design and an operational building, two years in; it is significantly different. Those measures are up to 250 per cent difference. So you have a massive gap in place, accounted for largely in behavioural issues.’

Celeste Giusti, senior strategic planner at the GLA, said the LDA, now within the GLA, has secured £2.5m of funding from the EU to deliver a decentralised energy programme for London by 2025.  Because of the Mayor’s policies London has seen a four per cent increase in ‘green jobs’, said Giusti, which had helped to bring in over £23bn to the London economy. Other schemes are also bearing fruit. The Re:Fit programme’s main aim is to retrofit 40 per cent of public sector buildings across London – already, savings of £1m a year have been achieved in energy bills from 42 buildings the GLA either owns or occupies. The RE:NEW scheme aims to retrofit 1.2m homes across London by 2015, with 11,000 already completed and a 55,000 target by March 2015. 

David Taylor, editor, New London Quarterly

London's Future Office Occupier Requirements - 6/12/2011

The office occupier of the future will require more adaptable, efficient and technologically progressive spaces to get the most out of their assets and lure the best staff.

This was the headline finding from a special conference at the NLA yesterday on London’s future office occupier requirements, sponsored by GVA and chaired by Property Week’s Giles Barrie.

The conference heard that demand for new offices would be driven largely by changing demographics, GVA’s director of occupier services Howard Cooke warning that the UK’s ageing population could give rise to 10 per cent of office space becoming surplus to requirements. Space requirements will be less about cost and more about ‘value for money’, he said, with greater flexibility, more collaborative, ‘hotel-like’ space, and the likely growth sectors being those in technology, media and small business. ‘Work is what you do, not where you go’, he said.

But at the same time, firms such as Price Waterhouse Coopers, where the average age is 28, were showing that younger staff are seeking more in the way of new ways of working, sustainable features, extra facilities, and proximity to bars and restaurants, as well as displaying a notable lack of interest in parking facilities. PwC’s More London building, for example, part of the company’s drive to get 90% efficiency across the group, along with a modern refurbishment of its Embankment Place site, has 260 bike racks to replace car spaces. PwC estate director Paul Harrington said the company was using space more intelligently, with better ratios and creation of more ‘inspiring’ spaces. ‘Open plan used to mean battery farming, squeezing in as many desks as possible. We’re moving now to more free range’, he said. Property is less about the bottom line and more about marketing, recruitment and efficiency.

British Land’s Paul Burgess said that ‘the days of oversupply in central London had gone’, with ‘the most constricted supply side I have ever known.’ But keys to success in providing space in the future will be to do with connectivity, ‘presence with new sensitivities’ as regards green issues, as well as openness and transparency. Structural adaptability so tenants can adjust the base build, was also important, and so that more staff members could feel proud of the place in which they work.

A greater degree of refurbishing older stock might be one way forward, said Wade Scaramucci of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, showing the cost and energy benefits of schemes like the Angel Building. These could result in ‘cleaner, leaner’ buildings, while Cordless Group consulting director Matthew Wailling said that technological advances such as the Cloud will bring efficiencies, firms like Rentokil providing an example in pushing facilities onto the Cloud only for their 25,000 office-based staff. The future will likely bring in more ‘Jelly bean working’ – essentially where people working on documents can see the real time presence of others through colour codes similar to the reds and greens used to show whether someone is online in software such as Skype.

Presenting a series of trends in occupiers as they relate to different sectors, managing partner of KKS Strategy Katrina Kostic Samen agreed that flexible working patterns and new technology will be important drivers in the way forward. There will also be scope for a greater use of natural light, improving infrastructure to cope with growing densities, perhaps more developers offering shared facility as at 20 Fenchurch Street, and serving a growing mobile workforce that works non-traditional hours: ‘It’s not going to be about presenteeism’, said Kostic Samen, ‘but productivity’.

David Taylor, Editor, New London Quarterly

Water, water everywhere? - 1/12/2011

London may have to resort to building a ‘Bazalgette 2’ system – which would make the Thames Tideway Tunnel ‘look like a Lego kit’ – if it does not attend to pressing water management concerns.

So said Alex Nixon, policy and programmes manager for the GLA at a special breakfast talk on ‘Water drainage, strategies of a modern city’, held at the NLA this morning.

Nixon said the drastic measure of building a new system to cope with London’s sewerage system – which is currently ‘at capacity’ – may only be allayed by extensive greening and other measures, with the Thames Tunnel ‘a necessary evil’ to cope with an enlarged city. ‘Bazalgette built a combined sewerage system for London’, he said. ‘The chances are that, unless we start to take a very long-term perspective on this, we will be forced by regular flooding to building another one that will make the Thames Tideway Tunnel look like a Lego kit.’

Londoners need to be better informed about the need to conserve water, making better connections between water and the environment and even making a better use of waste water as a potential source of clean energy. ‘People do not equate water efficiency with their energy bill’, said Nixon. We also need to look at retrofitting our homes and our businesses, he added, and cannot keep adding to our existing 150-year-old drainage system and expect it to keep performing. The number of homes in London with a water meter – just one in five – also needs to be lifted if behaviour is to be changed. As it is, Londoners use some 167 litres of water per person per day, amounting to 10% above the UK average.

The GLA has compiled a map which shows London’s susceptibility to surface water flooding at some 300 hotspots, a scenario which is worsened by the fact that an area the size of two-and-a-half Hyde Parks are lost by people ‘concreting over’ their gardens, every year. In terms of rainfall, we have also had two 1-in-100-year events in the last decade, plus a couple of one-in-400 year events. ‘It is fairly shocking. We are very, very vulnerable to surface water flooding’, said Nixon.

To address these problems, part of the approach is significantly more urban greening, but also to raise the profile of such issues through three ‘deep green makeovers’ currently being carried out, with work in schools on water management issues aimed at harnessing ‘pester power’ to spread to parents in their homes and workplaces.

AECOM director of sustainability Celeste Morgan said that there are lessons to be learned by the UK from the rest of the world, particularly from Europe and Australia, where Water Sensitive Urban Design (‘a verb, not a noun, and a process, not a product or a feature’) has been successful in making systems which not only work well, but look good too. One scheme in Melbourne, for example, uses a ‘zero water’ approach where no external water supply is used beyond that rainwater which is captured on site, resulting in a 99 per cent security of supply. But in the UK we are ‘still obsessed with flooding, attenuation and end up with big structures’. Schemes tend to be ‘terribly ugly’, whereas projects should be ‘far more about place, and about a great city that looks great’, with more designers and placemakers involved in water management.

A good example of design in this area, however, is being provided at the Olympic Park, said Phil Askew, project sponsor at the Olympic Park Legacy Company. The ponds, waterway treatments and planting it has carried out along the River Lea and across the park site will provide biodiversity and a ‘complicated but incredible site for London’s future.’ 

By David Taylor, Editor, New London Quarterly

Design review advice must be a material part of planning process, says Design Council Cabe - 28/11/2011

Design Council Cabe is lobbying government hard to get officials to recognise the discipline of design review and have it enshrined as a material planning consideration.

That was one of the key messages from a special session on design review held jointly by the organisation and the NLA on Friday morning. The moves, formulated to support the ‘well designed’ phrase as a condition of granting planning in the forthcoming National Planning Policy Framework promised next year, were set out by Design Council Cabe’s Design Review panel chair MJ Long. She told a packed audience that design review was entering a ‘very strange point of shifting territory’, but one where discussions about the importance of the review process with the DCLG are ongoing, and creation of a London panel being negotiated. ‘Design review panel advice must carry material weight’, she said, particularly in an era when charges for the service will start to apply.

The event was aimed at existing and prospective design review panel members, offering insights about best practice and the valuable experience of practitioners on the ground. Long advised that panellists should be ‘strategic’, but retain a careful ear to when, for instance, an architect might be designing for a developer’s brief they did not agree with. Senior adviser on design review at Design Council Cabe Menaka Sahai said that ‘ultimately, it’s about improving quality and that specially convened panels on issues such as the Olympics, Crossrail and schools had borne particular fruit, the last of these leading to the publication of minimum design standards. Space Syntax’s Tim Stonor suggested that larger masterplans could prove difficult; that social, environmental and economic tests should be applied to schemes, but that urbanism should not be forgotten – ‘we see very few design proposals for great streets’, he said. A worry was the kind of ‘fragmented urbanism’ or urban severance which resulted from communities becoming ‘cut-off’ through poor design advice.

Another design review panel member, Simon Hudspith, said that design review needed to also look to the micro scale when it came to housing and drill down to the way that people might use their homes, paying attention to issues such as dual aspect over single aspect in the name of better standards of living. Another issue is scale: ‘The bigger schemes become, the more concerned I become’, he said.

Finally, John Lyall said that design review should never be ‘criticism for its own sake’ and panellists had a duty to the users. Issues to be wary of included architects and developers who draw a red line around their scheme to the detriment of those around, rather than ‘contaminating’ the environs, projects which neglected the public realm, and presenters who brought in specialist sustainable consultants rather than imbuing their proposals with the principle as a fundamental.

Following a session on more advice about the role of a design review panel member from Design Council Cabe’s Thomas Bender, the event then split into three mock sessions. These involved design review sessions with a presenter from the project and delegates quizzing them over aspects of the scheme. The schemes were the Make-designed St Alphage London Wall project for Hammerson presented by Make’s Ian Lomas, another which assessed Bicester Eco-town, with presenter Gary Young from Farrells and the Minoco Wharf project, presented by Glen Howells of Glen Howells Architects.

David Taylor, Editor, New London Quarterly

NLA Education Conference Report - 22/11/2011

London is facing a shortfall of some 70,000 school places over the next four years, but providers could improve the process of meeting that demand by looking at higher densities, building tall, and by using a greater degree of standardised components. Those were some of the key findings of an NLA conference held on 17 November, which looked into the aftermath of the James Review into school capital spending.

The key points raised at the conference were:

• There are around 1 million pupils in London (61% of them at primary level)

• The forecast is for an extra 100,000 pupils between 2010/2011 and 2014/15

• Over 70,000 more permanent school places are needed over the spending review period

• Nearly 10,000 pupils in London are being taught in temporary classrooms, 90% of them in reception to Year 2 classes

• London has disproportionate funding, ending up with less comparative to the rest of the country than if funding was based on a shortfall in school places. ‘There are problems around the country, but they are much bigger in London’  - Mike Pocock, Divisional Director, Education Estates and Capital Projects, Lambeth Council

• Schools are having to be innovative in finding space for pupils, along with the creation of more ‘bulge classes’

• Lambeth has had a 29% increase in reception applications over 5 years; but the 14% increase in birth rate over that time is ‘only about half the explanation’, immigration being one of the others

• This year, Lambeth will do more than £50m of school building work in the borough, 40% of which is the remains of BSF programme, 60% in primary schools

• 11 FE expansion are projects ready to start – but there are very few sites for new build

• GLA projections have proven to be a ‘complete underestimate’. ‘They do not reflect reality. We realised 4 years ago we had to move away from that in planning’, says Pocock. ‘I have a very big worry about whether we will actually have enough places, going forward.’

• The drivers of current education policies are about meeting demand

• The James review cites standardised designs and specifications – a suite of drawings and specifications to be used to illustrate ‘fit for purpose’, said Mike Coleman, Regional Operations Director, Partnership for Schools. ‘That’s a little bit vague, in my view’. ‘We’re talking about a kit of parts’…‘What we are talking about is providing fit for purpose buildings…The concept of landmark designs no longer applies’

• A capital review pilot is taking place in Doncaster to look at emergent thinking, which focuses on a quick procurement route, and resulting in savings of some £4m to the taxpayer through reduced capital costs. ‘The feeling is in terms of fitness for purpose that we have been able to provide a building which fulfils the educational need and addresses the original problems that they had.’

• The privately financed Priority School Building Programme will be managed centrally by Partnerships for Schools, and then the Education Funding Agency when PfS is absorbed into that body next year. This will provide £2bn for 100-300 schools, delivered over five years, focused on schools with the largest condition need.

• 24 Free Schools opened recently – more than 55 are set to open in September 2012. Refurbishment, not new build, is the norm here. 

• Coleman on the school places problem: ‘It does seem to have been something which has been put on the backburner until it was too late. But we are where we are. We are repeating history here’

• Buildings, however iconic, innovative or well-suited are not the sole reason for school transformation – the teaching is, says Catherine Pinder, Project Manager, ARK Schools

• But: ‘Fit for purpose’ to ARK means: a focus on the inside, not outside; high quality, flexible classrooms; rationalised circulation; high quality fittings, furniture and equipment; and the use of high quality, robust, easily maintainable materials. ‘We don’t think successful delivery is only about construction budgets’

• 70% of our school stock at the moment is over 25 years old

• Refurbishment options for schools are sometimes more expensive than new build, but have the benefit of good space standards, bring identity and are triggers for regeneration, said Darren Talbot – head of schools at Davis Langdon. But they also often lack efficient space, are unsuitable for the curriculum, necessitate temporary accommodation and disruption to school environment

• The retail sector uses kit of parts solutions – why don’t we look at kit of parts for some refurbishments and refreshes? – Darren Talbot – head of schools Davis Langdon

• 82% of respondents to a survey said they would accept some form of standardisation – ‘I think the landscape has changed’. ‘Standardised means a lot of different things to a lot of different people’ – Philip Watson - Atkins

• ‘We believe that without really trying very hard we can make around 85% of a new school standardised design, where we can guarantee the quality of the environment. It’s in the spaces in between – that 15% where we can give the school identity’…‘This absolutely does not prescribe a form’

• Schemes should be measured in £ per pupil per annum, believes Stephen Hockaday, Director, Laing O'Rourke. 

• The 70,000 school places needed up to 2014/15 are only a start. Demographic forces driving this are still there. ‘I want us to start thinking about the next 70,000 beyond that, which is going to be an even bigger challenge because we are going to run out of easy options’  - Barney Stringer, Director, Quod Planning

• 70,000 places equates to £1.3bn, or four times what the Mayor’s Crossrail Levy will raise. It is also equivalent to 80 hectares, or King’s Cross Central three times over

• High density and multi-floor solutions are being investigated, some with housing or other facilities above the school, but even at high densities councils are finding it hard to find the land and money

• Stringer:  ‘There’s no way that London can provide the school capacity it needs in the medium term without an engagement or partnership with developers and without looking at these high density designs’

NLA City of London Development Conference - 14/11/2011

London needs to sort out its aviation issues and ease the regulatory burden on companies if The City’s predominance in world rankings is to be maintained. But it must also capitalise on the quality of the Square Mile as a place, with refurbishments likely to hold the key for the next phase of development.

Those were some of the key points made in the latest On Location event held on 9 November by the NLA on the subject of The City, at the Guildhall.  

· London needs investment in crucial infrastructure and airport provision if it is to avoid losing ground on other cities, warned the Corporation of London’s Stuart Fraser. ‘We need it now – in 25 years’ time is too late’, he said. ‘We will lose business because of that’.

· London is still attractive; a safe haven for overseas money – Brookfield’s Martin Jepson. ‘The fundamentals of the market are actually pretty good’ – limited supply and potential demand coming through.

· There are, however, very few big pre-let opportunities

· 60% of take-up in London is triggered by lease events

· If all pipeline projects in the next four years are built out it will represent some £12-13 billion of construction jobs – EC Harris’ Roger Taylor

· Projects in the City represent 65% of the London pipeline

· London is an expensive city in which to locate a business because of myriad regulatory reasons, said Fraser.

· The proposed relaxation of planning laws to allow more conversions of offices to residential will ‘sterilise’ the City, said Fraser.

· City planning officer Peter Rees said that the City has advantages over other locations for businesses such as Frankfurt (‘the place sucks’) and the ‘hellhole’ of Dubai in terms of the quality of space London can offer, especially between buildings. These include the narrow streets and alleyways where people stop to gossip, exchange information and capitalise on it once back in their offices in terms of deals.

· Refurbishment is the new building typology for the City – Rees

· It is time to concentrate on a better environmental model for new buildings which does not use as much glass, said MAKE architect Ken Shuttleworth. The age of the ‘bling’ building and glass box was over, he said, and it is time to create buildings with more solid elements to cut down on solar gain. ‘The love affair – the orgy – we have had with glass buildings is over. We are campaigning for the death of the glass box’  

Selected quotations:

‘There is only one reason to build tall and that is through a lack of space’ – Peter Rees.

‘If we don’t change now, we’re going to have a problem down the line’ Ken Shuttleworth

‘In the last 25 years two big things have happened to the City – Big Bang and me. I’ve been trying to make the City a better place than the bankers would have.’ Peter Rees.

By David Taylor, Editor, New London Quarterly

Build the Thames Hub or continue losing £1 billion a year - 11/11/2011

The cost to the UK of doing nothing about our ‘creaking, leaking’ transport infrastructure amounts to some £1 billion a year, said Halcrow’s Europe director Ben Halmer. Halmer was talking alongside Foster + Partners partner Huw Thomas at a special NLA breakfast briefing this morning, detailing the two firms’ £50 billion plans for a new Thames Hub.

The plan, at this stage a self-funded £100,000 study, proposes a ‘spine’ of high speed rail connections for the UK linking north with south and on to Europe; rail freight connections between the UK’s redeveloped main sea ports; the creation of a 150 million passenger airport to replace Heathrow and a tidal energy barrage and a new flood protection barrier.

The electricity generated by the barrage could power the airport or 250,000 homes, while the rail links could be submerged and hidden by ramped landscaping using the dug soil, said Lord Foster in a video played to the audience. ‘It could be an incredible initiative’, he said. ‘It is a true investment for the future.’

The ‘integrated vision for Britain’ – opposed by Medway Council and Friends of the Earth – envisages a four runway airport built partly on reclaimed land on the Isle of Grain which could handle 150 million passengers per year.  This is considered crucial to prevent Europe gaining competitive advantage, faced with Heathrow’s 98 per cent capacity, and in order to serve new trading markets further afield. The long-term vision, which spans the next 50 years into 2060, is designed to reinforce the United Kingdom’s position as the world’s leading commercial, tourist and financial centre.

Halmer said that what he feared was a ‘drift’ into further uncompetitiveness in terms of trade – decisions had to be made now. An example was the six years it took for Foster’s Chek Lap Kok airport to be built in Hong Kong, or the lead Beijing has stolen on the UK with its new terminal. ‘This isn’t just a fluffy vision dreamt up over a cup of tea’ said Halmer – discussions have been held inside government and with potential investors, the entire project likely to be funded by the private sector.  ‘There’s a wall of funding out there for good business cases’, he said. ‘This can be delivered by 2020, and it has to be because we’re coming to the end of capacity’. The airport element of the scheme will face environmental challenges, but was an ideal counter to the political issues faced by the five million people affected by Heathrow’s flight path. Halmer added that a new ‘bird island’ could be created to offset some of these concerns.

‘London is a suppressor on our ability to trade’, said Halmer. ‘A bottleneck.’

Thomas said the scheme would be complementary to High Speed 2, but that political will is crucial. ‘Politicians need to do what politicians should be doing, which is making big decisions.’  

David Taylor, Editor, New London Quarterly

Briefing Note: Delivering London’s Housing Needs - 4/11/2011

The housing sector in London is facing a shortfall of supply, seismic changes to affordable housing funding and provision, and ongoing financial challenges from mortgages through to local authorities.  

The key points raised at the latest NLA conference on the subject were:      

London mayor Boris Johnson is likely to cite record affordable housing completions – 16,000 during 2011/2012 and 50,000 over the last four years as part of his mayoral election campaign. 

The GLA forecasts a similar level of completions up to 2015.     

The GLA has worked hard to ensure exemptions from the 80% rule on affordable housing (where renters must pay 80% of the market rate) in cases such as large family homes – GLA interim director of housing David Lunts estimates that the average under the new programme across London will work out nearer to 65%.

London house prices are twice the national average, with rents increasing by close to 20 per cent, year-on-year.   

Even in the same postcode, rents can vary by 50%. 

There are fewer home-owners now than there were a decade ago ·     

It is, however, very unlikely we will see a major recovery in mortgage lending. ‘What we’re facing is the new norm’.   

The average salary of a G15 London housing association tenant is £15,000. 

Debt is a key issue. The G15 has to raise £2billion, while the affordable housing sector needs to raise some £24 billion in private debt - or around 30 per cent of all UK bond issues.

London gets £628m of £1.8bn over the next four years, with which Grant Shapps wants to build 150,000 homes, 22,000 of which will be affordable.   

The Vauxhall Nine Elms Opportunity Area is on course to secure around 19,000 homes rather than the projected 16,000, according to Wandsworth assistant director of planning and environmental services Seema Manchanda.

London property is seen as a safe home for overseas investment, with 60% of all investment into the capital being from countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, China and Hong Kong. Questions arise about how this helps indigenous Londoners or those who want to get onto the property ladder. The ratio could get bigger still if China relaxed its policies on overseas investment.

London’s ability to move and react quicker to the housing market will be significantly improved when it is shortly free from having to apply to Treasury or other departments for money to spend, or be conditional on the housing market elsewhere in the UK.     

The GLA will be producing an SPG on affordable housing and an Early Alteration to the London Plan in the next month, making it clear that, essentially, the sector will not just be social rented housing but affordable and intermediate rented housing as well.

Selcted quotations from the event: 

‘We need a proper strategy for housing – I’m afraid I don’t think we have one. I think we have a minister who has a strategy for affordable housing but I’m not at all convinced that I could tell you what his strategy for housing more widely might look like’ – Keith Exford, chair, G15 and chief executive, Affinity Sutton

‘Anyone who thinks we can provide subsidised housing without subsidy, as some of the think tanks and some of the politicians seem to believe, are deluding themselves. If I could pull a rabbit out of a hat to provide housing at below market price without some sort of subsidy – be it free land or grant or whatever it is, then I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you. I’d be on my yacht in Monaco or somewhere like that telling other people how to do it’ – Keith Exford, chair, G15 and chief executive, Affinity Sutton

‘The situation on first time buyers hasn’t got any worse, because it couldn’t get any worse’ – Jennet Siebrits, head of residential research, CB Richard Ellis

‘Let’s get building; let’s get mortgages, and let’s get confidence. We feel at the G15 that there’s work to be done in making the economic case for housing. We think the argument is winnable, but we can’t find the data to prove it’ - Keith Exford, chair, G15 and chief executive, Affinity Sutton

‘We should remember that from this CSR about £3billion is going to come for affordable housing. Most of it is going into new homes, and this part of the most difficult CSR negotiation in living history….Before we give up on things we should assume that around £3billion should be our baseline going forward. So we shouldn’t assume that there will be no public money in the future – the important thing is to lobby for it and make sure it deals with the problems we have got outside of those zone 1 prime markets’ – GLA interim director of housing David Lunts.

The findings came from the NLA’s latest conference on the sector: Delivering London’s Housing Needs, which took place on 13 October 2011.