Pil103 october issuu ed by brianwaters1

PEABODY’S JOHN LEWIS – Fulfilling the vision of Thamesmead page 70 REBEKAH PACZEK – Building homes for Londoners page 20 STEVE EDGE – Thoughts on the future of city transport page 97 Issue 103 October-December 2017

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CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF HELLMAN CARTOONS – page 8 Sir Terry Farrell CBE – A Life in Planning page 51; Euan Mills – How tech companies are after your planning department page 14; Charles Campion – Leasehold reform needs care page 23; Janice Morphet – Councils get back to building homes page 86; Rab Bennetts –Woolwich Creative District page 62 THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO DEVELOPMENT IN THE CAPITAL

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CONTENTS

page 5 LEADERS Less doing, Certifying compliance, Co-living and co-working 8 Celebrating 50 years of Hellman cartoons Hellman’s choice of top PiL covers – Louis Hellman OPINIONS 14 Euan Mills – How tech companies are after your planning department SIR TERRY FARRELL CBE – A Life in Planning page 51

18 Barry Mortimer– Mayor’s focus on small sites can help solve London’s housing crisis 19 Duncan Field – The Airports NPS continues to circle before landing 20 Rebekah Paczek – Building homes for Londoners 23 Charles Campion – Leasehold reform needs care 24 Julia Park – Has design-and-build lost its way? 25 Shabana Anwar – More homes for Londoners 26 Adam Cook – The conception of housing estates 28 ANDY ROGERS Losing the plot on conservation areas

PEABODY’S JOHN LEWIS Fulfilling the vision of Thamesmead page 70

30 BRIEFING PLANNING PERFORMANCE Major residential permissions up nine per cent, all else a bit flat 34 NEIL PARKYN Satanic Mills or Silicon Roundabouts? 36 CLIPBOARD 39 ¡PILLO! 40 LONDON PLANNING & DEVELOPMENT FORUM Mayor's Transport Strategy & a new Design Companion 51 SIR TERRY FARRELL CBE A Life in Planning

ANDY ROGERS Losing the plot on conservation areas page 28

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59 DISTRICT ENERGY Dominic Barton – Powering King’s Cross

Continues next page >>>

Issue 103 October-December 2017

CONTENTS CONTINUED

>>>

62 WOOLWICH CREATIVE DISTRICT Rab Bennetts 65 A LANDOWNER’S LEGACY TO GARDEN VILLAGES – Robbie Kerr 70 FULFILLING THE VISION OF THAMESMEAD John Lewis 73 SMART BUILDINGS Roy McGowan & Dave Murphy

+Books for review by readers 92 PLANNING AND ENVIRONMENT REFERENCE GUIDE Contacts in all London boroughs 96 SUBSCRIPTION FORM 97 STEVE EDGE Thoughts on the future of city transport

75 GRENFELL TOWER – ISSUES PROSECUTORS SHOULD CONSIDER David Beckenham 78 CAN THE PLANNING SYSTEM MEET THE NEED FOR POLICY CHANGE? Michael Bach 80 A million new homes need no Greenfields Alice Roberts 83 A BLUE-GREEN GRID Lars Christian 86 COUNCILS GET BACK TO BUILDING HOMES Janice Morphet 88 BOOKS Nigel Moor reviews Public Consultation and Community Involvement In Planning Esther Kurland pre-views The Design Companion for Planning and Placemaking

ISSN 1366-9672 (PRINT) ISSN 2053-4124 (DIGITAL) Issue 103 October-December 2017

Publishing Editors: Brian Waters, Paul Finch and Lee Mallett editor@planninginlondon.com, planninginlondon@mac.com Editorial, subscriptions and advertising: Tel: 020 8948 2387/ 07957871477 Email: planninginlondon@mac.com Contents ©Land Research Unit Ltd or as stated Available only on subscription: £99 pa

99 ADVICE – Consultants and services Provides a licence for five copies by email See subscription form or buy online at www.planninginlondon.com. Planning in London is published quarterly in association with The London Planning & Development Forum by Land Research Unit Ltd Studio Petersham, Gorshott, 181 Petersham Road TW10 7AW Contributors write in a personal capacity. Their

views are not necessarily those of The London Development & Planning Forum or of their organisations. Correspondence and contributions are invited for consideration. The editors reserve the right to edit material and letters supplied.

Design Council CABE City of London Law Society Confederation for British Industry DCLG Design for London/Urban Design London Historic England Environment Agency Greater London Authority Home Builders Federation Landscape Architecture SE London Chambers of Commerce & Industry London Forum of Amenity Societies London Housing Federation National Planning Forum ICE, RIBA, RICS, RTPI, UDAL, TCPA Transport for London London University (The Bartlett, UCL) University of Westminster

Affiliated members: Planning Aid for London London Metropolitan University

 Made on a Mac

www.planninginlondon.com The London Planning and Development Forum (LPDF) The LPDF was formed in 1980 following an all-party inquiry into the development control system. It selects topics to debate at its quarterly meetings and these views are reported to constituent bodies. It is a sounding board for the development of planning policy in the capital, used by both the public and private sector. Agendas and minutes are at planninginlondon.com. To attend please advise hon. secretary Drummond Robson: robplan@btconnect.com The LPDF is administered by: Honorary Secretary: Drummond Robson MRTPI,

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41 Fitzjohn Avenue, Barnet, Herts EN5 2HN Tel: 0208 449 3113 Fax: 0208 440 2015: robplan@btconnect.com Chairman: Brian Waters MA DipArch (Cantab) DipTP RIBA MRTPI ACArch P.ACA FRSA Principal: The Boisot Waters Cohen Partnership brian@bwcp.co.uk Honorary Treasurer: Alastair Gaskin alastair.gaskin@btinternet.com Member bodies Association of Consultant Architects Association of London Borough Planning Officers/Planning Officers’ Society London Councils British Property Federation

THE LP&DF IS ASSOCIATED WITH THE LONDON SOCIETY

LEADERS

Less doing Concern at lack of resources in development management departments of local planning authorities is, if anything, stronger amongst developers than it is within those departments. We have argued before that this concern should be addressed by giving planning authorities less to do and by ensuring that they choose to do less as well. The first is in the hands of politicians and the DCLG. There is a tendency when simplifying planning to make it far more complex. Martin Goodall's excellent book A Practical Guide to Permitted Changes of Use runs to 340 pages!* What can a local planning authority do on it own initiative? Local members, elected by residents, naturally like to get involved in the minutiae of local planning disputes – one of the areas where they can be seen to have a purpose, so this may go against the grain. Since 2004 authorities have had powers to introduce Local Development Orders (LDOs) by which they can selectively relax statutory planning rules. Almost never used. Surprise. Government has tried to encourage their adoption and one good example, sadly not in London, is the imminent introduction by Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council of their household extension LDO. This will add to existing PD rights by allowing for slightly larger home extensions, for example by extending PD rights from 3m to 4m for a detached house but more usefully to embrace two storey rear and side extension and two storey extensions. The council says that over half of its workload of 700 householder planning applications would be covered even though conservation areas and listed buildings are excluded. We will be happy to report on London examples of LDOs which free up the system and reduce workloads for development management teams.

Certifying compliance

Planning in London has been published and edited by Brian Waters, Lee Mallett and Paul Finch since 1992

Notwithstanding the above, one of the odd things about our planning system is the absence of signoff to certify compliance with the planning permission as granted and all its conditions. In Spain, for example, before electricity can be connected to a new building, a certificate of compliance with the planning permission has to be signed by the architect and the local planning officer. (If the building is a place of work then a medical doctor also has to certify for health and safety of the workplace). This establishes continuity of responsibility and is enforced by a simple but unavoidable sanction. A fee is payable to the council and therefore does not compromise resources but rather adds to the weight of authority bestowed on both the local planning authority and the architect as an independent professional. Would that this process were in place with the refurbishment and insulation of Grenfell Tower. Inquiries proceed but it seems clear already that there was no independent professional responsible for the proper implementation of the original design intention. One of the possible recommendations might therefore be a legal requirement, with sanctions, that an independent (i.e. not in the pay of the builder) professional takes responsibility both for the design and its performance and also for its correct implementation for planning as well as for building control. This may be something which Nick Raynsford’s review of planning might consider. When launching his call for evidence he said: “More than ever we need a planning system which commands the confidence of the public and delivers outcomes of which we can feel proud.” Certifying compliance >>> would help achieve this.

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Issue 103 October-December 2017

LEADERS

Co-living and co-working “Concierge service, room cleaning, communal spaces and all-inclusive bills – welcome to the world of co-living, a world that generation rent seems set to dominate.” One of many stories about new London living developments like Co-living’s ‘The Collective' at Old Oak Common. According to Planning, commentators say they expect the sector to grow fast, with London a key hotspot, followed by Manchester and Birmingham. Other developments incorporate workspaces and indeed mix working facilities with living arrangements. But they don't fit the Use Classes Order. It helps that Coliving’s Sui Generis use class means local and national policies on affordable housing and space standards do not apply. The knee-jerk reaction is to call for yet another use class but these are tools of restriction; simplifying planning means reducing the number of classes by merging them and allowing more changes and mixtures of uses. In practice the Use Classes Order causes planning to hang behind the curve even more than out-of-date local development plans do, rather than injecting vision and leading the market in innovative lifestyle developments. Such changes are hard to achieve because the system (essentially a rationing and control process) protects property values. As noted here before, the Chancellor of the Exchequer once observed that the relaxation in the 1980s of then Class III (light industrial use) with its merger into B1 (offices) gave a greater boost to the economy then did Big Bang. So in a follow-up to the achievements of live-and-work units which so invigorated Shoreditch and Hoxton some years ago, why not define co-living and co-working widely and give them permitted development rights using the Prior Notification route to simplified planning control? This will give at least half a step onto the housing ladder for generation rent.

*Do come to the seminar launching Martin Goodall’s new book The Essential Guide to the Use of Land and Buildings under the Planning Acts on 17th November at the RIBA, even though it is to be chaired by your editor. Find details and your PiL readers’ discount offer on our back cover.

THE UK PORTAL FOR JOBS IN TOWN PLANNING

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FORTHCOMI FORTHCOMING FORTHCOM EVENTS

BANISTE FLETCHER BANIST BANI BANISTER FL FLE FLET FLETCHE F LECTU 2017 LECTURE

Tuesday 17 October 2017 6:30-8:30pm Loyd Grossman CBE: “The Future of the Royal Parks” The eight Royal Parks – stretching from Bushy in the West to Greenwich in the East – are amongst London's greatest and most distinctive assets, but they face a number of challenges. How can we ensure the future of the greatest collection of urban parks in the world? Join Chairman of the Royal Parks, Loyd Grossman as he looks at the past and future of these public spaces. Tickets: free to members of the London Society, £14 to guests and non-members

Monday 23 October 2017 6:30-8:30pm TOUR | Historic Islington Pubs Architectural pub historian Geoff Brandwood leads this tour of three fine examples from the golden age of pub building at the end of the Victorian era, all of which retain much of their original character. Tickets: £10 / £15

Date TBC TOUR | The Beaumont Hotel The Society takes you behind the scenes to see the refurbishment of this Art Deco Mayfair icon.

PLANNING SCHOOL PLANNI

Following our successful ‘Architecture School’ held in the Spring, we have five classes that examine the history and the development of planning in London. Talks will be held on Saturday mornings in at the Building Centre in Store Street, WC1. For further information, visit

londonsociety.org.uk/planning

Saturday, 21October London History: 2000 years of London Plans Duncan Bowie will review the plans for London; from the Roman Governor Ostorius Scapula, through Wren and Nash to Pepler, Unwin, Abercrombie, Livingstone and Johnson, together with numerous others. Saturday, 28 October Social/Affordable Housing in London Dr Paul Watt examines what is meant by ‘social rental housing’ and ‘affordable housing’ in the London context, then offers a brief history of the development of social housing in London. Saturday, 4 November Regeneration in London Dr Paul Watt examines what is meant by ‘urban regeneration’ with a brief discussion of various kinds of regeneration programmes in London, then looks at ‘sports-led regeneration’ and in so doing provides an in-depth analysis of the 2012 Olympic Games. Saturday, 11 November Delivering Growth: How change happens on the ground What does ‘local growth’ look like? Can you plan for it? Who are the key players in making places successful? Rachel Fisher will explore the flip side of local growth – can places become too successful? Saturday, 18 November The Future of Planning: What’s broken & how should we fix it? Cities feed on people and goods to fuel the global economy. By 2050, the global population is expected to exceed ten billion people, 75% of whom will be living in cities. London is not immune to change. Zoe Green explains.

NOVEMBER NOVEMBE NOVEM NOVE

Tuesday 7 November 2017 6:30-8:30pm TALK | London Icons: the Illuminated River Project Director of the Illuminated River Foundation, Sarah Gaventa, talks about US artist Leo Villareal’s concept to create a subtle kinetic light sculpture that will light up and unify the bridges of central London. Tickets: £7 / £14. Free to Student members and Corporate Supporters Thursday 23 November 2017 6:30-8:30pm TALK | London’s Great Estates: King’s Cross – creating a new ‘Great Estate’ for London Nick Searl of Argent will take us through the story of how the King’s Cross development was conceived and how a focus on people has been central to the way it has been designed and is now being managed. Tickets: £7 / £14. Free to Student members and Corporate Supporters

DECEMBER DECEMBE DECEM DECE DE

Tuesday 5 December 2017 6:30-8:30pm TALK | Discovering Secret London How well do you know London? Matt Brown, editor-at-large of The Londonist, takes us on a tour of parts you might not be aware of - from the deepest catacombs to the highest rooftops. Followed by drinks and mince pies. Saturday 9 December 2017 10:30am-12:30pm TOUR | Architectural Walk Join Blue Badge Guide David Thompson as he explores the architectural treasures of another area of the capital.

! ! Boo Book on onl onli onlin aat lo londonsso londo lond lon london socciety.org.u cie ciet ciety ciety. ciety.o ciety.or ciety.org ciety.org. ciety.org.uk k/ k/e k/ev k/eve k/even k/event k/events Bo! oonline

HELLMAN’S CHOICE OF TOP PIL COVERS | LOUIS HELLMAN

Celebrating 50 years of Hellman cartoons It's 1967. The ‘Summer of Love’ is over, signalling the end of the hippy dream of a world in love and peace. Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson shows the public that the devalued pound in the pocket is still worth a pound and yet another (abortive) scheme to extend the Palace of Westminster is unveiled. The following year a gas explosion high in the council tower block Roman point causes the prefabricated external walls to collapse, kills four people and one of the main (precast) planks in the modern movement’s edifice of precepts starts to crumble. What better time to start publishing satirical cartoons on architecture and the built environment? In the intervening decades I have tracked the demise of high rise, the bruising of New Brutalism, the less than spectacular Neo-Vernacular, the posturing of PostModernism, the thrashing from Thatcherism, the dogmas of

Planning in London

Docklands developments, the chagrin of Prince Charlatan, the conundrum of Community Architecture, the contortions of Conservation, the mono mania of Mock Classicism, the compulsion of computer-aided design, the decompositions of Deconstructivism, the Neologisms of New Labour neophytes, the hegemony of High-Tec and the bluster of Blobitecture. Fifty years on history burps and repeats itself. Another tower block tragedy brings cost-cutting developers and government into disrepute, a severe economic crisis rages as Great Britain shoots itself in the proverbial 30cm, (i.e. Brexit) and the world trembles in fear of a nuclear holocaust as the US and communism rattle their missile sabres. But it's an ill wind as all this is grist to the mill of satirical cartooning and always will be.

Louis Hellman

>>>

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Issue 103 October-December 2017

Planning in London

HELLMAN’S CHOICE OF TOP PIL COVERS | LOUIS HELLMAN

Issue 56. 2000 King Ken, the new London Mayor as the scourge of the boroughs. Issue 65 2008 The projected third Heathrow runway. Will profit and pollution take off or will protest touch down? Issue 68 2009 An emperor’s new clothes variation. Mayor Johnson promotes high rise offices and apartments which may claim to be “sustainable”, a meaningless term much used by politicians. Vastly more energy and carbon would be saved by not building these megaliths. This cartoon annoyed architects. Issue 69 2009 Planning is riding the economic crisis switchback with lots of ideas for when the upturn comes. It never does. Issue 70 2009 Like Livinstone Mayor Johnson cosies up to developers and foreign specula-

tors with their architect poodles to pepper the capital with office and residential towers and destroy London’s special character. They are the new symbols of wealth and power to supersede church and state. Issue 71 2009 London housing in crisis due to a scarcity of affordable homes, bad planning , dereliction and carbon guzzling. Quack doctors in housing organisations and government have no diagnosis to offer while CABE gives ignored advice. Issue 73 2010 Prime Minister Cameron as Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland spouting his vague and contradictory planning policies. Issue 74 2010 Mayor Johnson tackles Pizza di Londra and its plethora of bureaucratic agencies and makes a hash of it as he does

of most things. Issue 75 2010 The Cameron government’s pretence at promoting “localism” which is an excuse for cuts to planning agencies and regulations as part of the imposition of austerity on the most vulnerable. A parody of The League of Gentlemen’s Royston Vasey sketches. Issue 79 2011 The London riots were said to be the result of underprivileged youth from sink housing estates taking revenge on the wasteful consumer society. I enjoyed the pun of “Loot Fockers”. Issue 82 2012 The myth of “localism” and its development plans while corporate speculators make hay and austerity bites the poor and disabled. Yearbook 2012 Ken Livingstone challenges the incumbent Mayor Boris Johnson who has

the London Olympics to spur him on while Middle East potentates build residential towers as cash cows. New planning legislation hurdles are in position for winner Johnson to knock over. Yearbook 2013 London’s housing crisis explodes with census predictions of population growth with Mayor Johnson trying to fit a quart into a pint pot of inadequate homes while social cleansing is rife and new housing is grabbed by overseas speculators. Issue 87 Foreign vultures descend on the capital for easy pickings. Issue 89 The Green Belt old cow in danger of being milked by vested interests. Issue 98 New Mayor Kahn tries to take control.

>>>

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Issue 103 October-December 2017

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OPINION: PLANTECH | EUAN MILLS

How tech companies are after your planning department The data that planning authorities have going through their system needs to be digitised and made machine readable, so that it can be aggregated and easily retrieved That technology is changing how we live in cities, is now as much of a cliche as re-hashed statistics about the proportion of the world's population that live in urban areas. But the urgency around the need to plan for these changes cannot be underestimated. Urban areas around the globe are growing at twice the pace of their populations. As London's greenbelt contains its sprawl, it grows by nearly 300 people per day depending on what population projections we look at, and whilst we can’t predict the future, it’s likely to continue for the next couple of decades. Meanwhile we’re experiencing radical shifts in the way we use cities, driven by technological advancements. Changes in the provision of space from an ownership model to ‘space as a service’ can be seen in businesses such as We:Work, The

14 Planning in London

Collective and Near Hear. Infrastructure is more responsive to changes in demand, as shown by the proliferation of energy smart meters and new forms of delivery and transport. How we experience place is altered by digital filters and augmented reality with the emergence of services like Google Lens and Snapchat, and our cities are now searchable, having been indexed by large corporations such as Google and Foursquare. This combination of rapid urbanisation and the dramatic changes technology is having in how we live in cities means our age-old ways of planning need an urgent upgrade. Our current plan-led approach, where we spend years producing evidence, consulting and debating our plans, means that by the time Local Plans are adopted they are out of date. If all goes according to schedule, the current Mayor of London will have his London Plan

Euan Mills is the Urban Design and Planning Lead at Future Cities Catapult

published in Autumn 2019, less than one year before his term in office comes to an end in 2020. In other words, he’ll have spent the majority of his time as Mayor implementing his predecessor’s plan. The unresponsiveness of the planning system is partly because of the quasi-judicial nature to UK town planning. Plans are written to stand up to scrutiny at Examinations in Public or Planning Appeals, where policies and their justifications are >>>

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Issue 103 October-December 2017

PLANTECH | EUAN MILLS

scrutinised for their every word. But as a result we are constantly playing catch-up to a rapidly changing world, where culture, politics and technology change faster than the speed at which we plan. Work on ‘reviews’ and ‘alterations’ of Local Plans are often underway as soon as Plans are adopted. In some cases we can spin SPG’s to bypass the lengthy timescales of formal Plans, but mostly we respond to these changes informally in Development Management, where heavily politicised decisions on development are made with lit>>> tle regard to the adopted policies. Whilst Development Management is where the most impactful decisions happen today, it not only needs to navigate these out-dated policies, but also suffers from a legacy of slow and analogue processes, inconsistent decisions and little, if any, learning. A typical London Planning authority spends over seven hours processing a Minor Planning Application. These tend to be applications for household extensions, advertising, boundary treatments and other relatively simple proposals that often simply require box-ticking checks, yet, only about half of these are approved. If a Local Authority receives 800 applications a year, over 200 days will be spent on applications that are not approved. This drain on resources prevents planners from keeping their plans up to date or ensuring their decisions are robust. Some Local

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Authorities are already looking at how they can automate aspects of this; for example Southwark Council, in partnership with Wikihouse and Future Cities Catapult, have been working on how automated screening of household extensions could cut the number of returned applications by over half. But many are reticent of adopting new technology to help them. The decision making process around major applications is also a relic of a bygone era. Reams of information setting out the impact of every proposed development is received with each application. Written by a plethora of consultants at huge expense, this information is mostly filed away unused, undermining any opportunity for cross-referencing applications, learning from previous decisions, or benefiting from the opportunities that aggregating this data could present. At Future Cities Catapult we have been looking at the potential benefits of Planning Authorities collating data from viability assessments. This would allow the creation of a viability tool, which would learn over time and be overlaid with housing capacity figures from SHLAA’s to try and benchmark site values. Fundamental to all this is how planning authorities treat data. The data going through their system needs to be digitised and made machine readable, so it can be aggregated and easily retrieved by planners, developers and the public alike.

Everything - from the data in evidence base reports, to planning policies, to planning applications and plan monitoring. And then we can start aggregating other sources of data, from social media, telecoms to smart meter usage, all contributing to a more robust understanding of the places we plan for. Large technology companies are already doing this. Google, with over one hundred million indexed places, has more data about our local high streets than our planning departments hold. They’ve created Sidewalks Lab to look into how they can help solve urban problems, and have even embarked in creating a neighbourhood from “the internet up” in Toronto. Others such as Facebook, are building affordable housing for its employees, CityMapper are providing buses in London and IBM, Siemens and Cisco continue to hard sell their ‘smart cities’ proprietary data platforms wherever they can. Having large private technology companies trying to solve urban problems can be a good thing. However, for our planning departments not to become subservient to commercial interests, we must re-establish our position as experts in the built environment. To do this we need to urgently digitise the data we already have, automating the processes we can, and start making use of some of the seven petabytes of data London produces every day. n

The Future of British High Streets: Working in Partnership to Revitalise and Modernise Town Centres A Public Policy Exchange Symposium

Tuesday 21st November 2017 10:15am â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 4:30pm Central London

Public Policy Exchange holds regular interactive seminars which provide an invaluable interface for policy discussion, debate and networking. These special events offer local practitioners, civil servants and other stakeholders not only an insight into current policy thinking, but also the opportunity to feed into future development across all areas of public policy.

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Issue 103 October-December 2017

OPINION: SMALL BUILDERS | BARRY MORTIMER

Mayor’s focus on small sites can help solve London’s housing crisis Unless burdens are minimised for the very smallest developments, SME builders will continue to struggle to enter the market says Barry Mortimer In London, where population density is at its highest, and land at its most scarce in the UK, the housing crisis is a growing cause for concern. For some time, the number of new homes being built every year in London has been stuck at around the low 20,000s. According to the Mayor of London’s draft Housing Strategy published earlier this month, the capital needs enough land to build more than 50,000 new homes every year for the next 25 years in order to keep pace with demand. If we are to build these new homes that Londoners so desperately need, we must make much better use of the many existing small sites that are dotted all over London. In doing so, we will strengthen the capacity of SME house builders to build more new homes and perhaps even attract more new firms into the market. Research by the Federation of Master Builders (FMB) has consistently shown that a lack of available and viable land is the most significant factor stunting the ability of small builders to deliver more new homes. Indeed, in the FMB’s House Builders’ Survey 2017, nearly two thirds of small builders said that the lack of available and viable land is a major barrier to their ability to increase output. More worryingly still, over half say that the number of opportunities to develop small sites is, if anything, decreasing. The reasons for this range from the administrative complexity and costs for planners when processing large numbers of small sites, to the frequently disproportionate resistance London boroughs face against smaller-scale development. We should therefore welcome strongly the proposal laid out in the aforementioned draft London Housing Strategy for a presumption in favour of appropriate residential development on small sites. This goes further than proposed changes to national policy set out in the Government’s Housing White Paper. The ‘Small sites, small builders’ programme announced in the Strategy will also link up public land owners with small builders, which could provide more opportunities for small firms to access public sector land.

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We also welcome moves which will mean that less of the Community Infrastructure Levy will be payable upfront on smaller sites. Large builders can to some extent achieve this anyway, because of the phasing of larger sites, but it is smaller builders with shallower pockets that get hit hardest by the upfront charge. This new policy will really help with cash flow for smaller builders and by doing so, it will make the economics of small scale development slightly easier. The draft Strategy therefore marks a step forward in empowering smaller house builders in London. In order to reach the 50,000 new homes London needs to build each year, this renewed emphasis on small sites is vital. If we can succeed in delivering more homes through the collective impact of many smaller developments, we can begin to even out the mismatch between supply and demand that is responsible for the capital’s housing crisis.

Barry Mortimer is director of FMB London

All such progress could however be undermined if the Mayor fails to protect small sites from onerous levels of developer contributions. National planning guidance states that planning obligations should not be sought from developments of ten units or fewer, but implementation of this policy in London is patchy at best. Unless the Mayor, and London boroughs, recognise the need to minimise burdens on the very smallest developments, SME builders will continue to struggle to enter the market. n

BELOW: % of development completed on brownfield land 2015/16. See Dominick Veaseya’s article on brownfield registers and PPIP

OPINION: AIPORT POLICY | DUNCAN FIELD

The Airports NPS continues to circle before landing The Government risks removing the full benefit of the consenting process for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects says Duncan Field When the Government announced its preference in October 2016 for meeting the need for additional airport capacity in the South East through a new North West runway at Heathrow (Heathrow R3) it committed itself to the designation of a new National Policy Statement (NPS) for Airports by 31 July 2017. Following the latest developments it now seems that the NPS will not be designated before July 2018. Consultation on the draft Airports NPS was launched in February 2017. By that time, the timetable for designating the Airports NPS had already slipped and in a statement to the House of Commons the Secretary of State for Transport indicated that he expected the NPS would be laid before Parliament and that the Commons would vote on the NPS in winter 2017-18. Consultation on the NPS closed on 25 May 2017 with over 70,000 responses. In a written statement to Parliament on 13 July 2017, the Secretary of State indicated that due to the timing of the General Election and the need to constitute a Select Committee inquiry into the Airports NPS, a vote in Parliament (and hence the designation of the NPS) had slipped from the end of 2017 to the first half of 2018. The General Election had other consequences for the Airports NPS. In a further written statement to Parliament on 7 September 2017, the Secretary of State explained that the Government had expected to release updated aviation demand forecasts and its final Air Quality Plan during the original consultation period for the NPS. Purdah guidelines meant that once the General Election had been announced, the publication of these documents was delayed (although the Government was subsequently forced to release the Air Quality Plan following a successful legal challenge by ClientEarth). As consequence, the Secretary of State confirmed that there would be a second short period of consultation to take account of these documents, starting later this year. Alongside the written statement in September,

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the Government published the interim report of Sir Jeremy Sullivan, who has been retained as the independent consultation adviser to the Secretary of State. It is clear from this interim report that had the Air Quality Plan and the revised forecasts been published during the original consultation on the NPS, it would have been necessary in any event to extend the consultation in order to give people the opportunity to consider and comment on these further background documents. However, with the interruption of the General Election and the close of the consultation period before both documents could be made available, Sir Jeremy Sullivan has suggested a second consultation process which should last a minimum period of 8 weeks, excluding the main school holiday periods. The interim report also addresses numerous criticisms of the original NPS consultation including its “hard sell” of Heathrow expansion in some of the consultation literature. However, whilst Sir Jeremy acknowledges some of the criticisms, he concludes that overall the consultation was wellexecuted. This will perhaps be helpful to the Government’s ability to resist successfully any future legal challenge on this issue. The second round of consultation on the Airports NPS raises some interesting issues. First, Heathrow Airport is intending to embark on its own consultation on R3 in the next few months as part of the pre-application requirements for its application for a development consent order. Caution will be needed to avoid overlap and confusion with the second consultation on the NPS and

Duncan Field is head of planning, UK, at Norton Rose Fulbright

some thought will need to be given to the challenges the local community faces in terms of the resources at their disposal to engage meaningfully with the process. Second, this further consultation on the Airports NPS provides an opportunity to address what many stakeholders felt was a key omission. Despite its generic title, the Airports NPS was focused largely on the reasons why the Government chose Heathrow R3 and the mitigation and compensation measures that the Government expects to be put into place. Many observed that it did not address in sufficient detail the Government’s position on expansion and use of existing runways at other airports. Whether the Government will take the opportunity to address this and in doing so, risk a potentially longer consultation period to accommodate further changes to the NPS remains to be seen. However, if it does not do so, the operators of airports other than Heathrow may argue that the Government risks removing from those airports the full benefit of the consenting process for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects. n

Issue 103 October-December 2017

OPINION: HOUSING POLICY | REBEKAH PACZEK

Building homes for Londoners Rebekah Paczek reacts to publication of the Mayor’s Draft Housing Strategy Well, isn’t this exciting, the Mayor of London has published something resembling a policy. Clearly, the document is prefaced by the obligatory full page shot of the man himself in casual conversation with someone we assume to be a voter rather than a member of his staff. The document opens with Sadiq Khan once again declaring housing to be the biggest barrier to growth facing London – which rather begs the question as to why so little seems to have been delivered in his 18 months in power and why the GLA are so reluctant to call in applications in many of the high housing target boroughs at the moment. In reality, we all know why they won’t call applications in – many of the high target boroughs are Labour and are already on an election footing despite the elections not being until May next year. As far as many are concerned, red lines have already been drawn against controversial applications – which basically includes any housing of any significance – so we can expect continued lethargy between now and May. Anyway, rant aside and back to the main document… The document sets out the parameters of the role which the Mayor sees for developers, local authorities, housing associations and City Hall. It seeks to address the existing immediate crisis as well as the long-term implications. The key priorities are set out as: • Building homes for Londoners – that phrase always confuses me, by definition if you live in London you are a Londoner, whether you have just moved to the area or not. It always sounds like a passive aggressive way of trying to keep northerners out of the Capital. • Delivering genuinely affordable homes – helpfully this is good and ambiguous with no actual definition of what is affordable – although committing to work towards a definition based on household income caps – meaning this can be fought out through viability but also that it opens the door to a range of approaches including pre-fab, PRS, pocket properties etc. • High quality homes and inclusive neighbourhoods – I assume the second part of this means no ‘poor doors’ or social segregation either within new developments or between new and existing

Planning in London

communities. • A fairer deal for private renters and leaseholders – providing better properties and terms for private renters is a huge issue within London, in which PRS has a big role to play alongside other legislation; if Central Government ever get round to producing a Housing Bill on the back of the White Paper we may get some further clarification on this more broadly. • Tacking homelessness and helping rough sleepers – very noble intentions but, in order to tackle homelessness effectively, you have to solve the entire housing crisis itself so it rather brings us back to the original point of the pace of development. Local Authorities and Investment Khan has signalled a return back to the London Plan under Ken Livingstone days when each borough had specific housing targets. He is also looking to step in to speed up the development on Council owned land – the fact that the GLA is currently not delivering much on the public land it is in control of does not appear to strike the Mayoral team as rather ironic. Admittedly, this is an arduous process and 18 months is possibly not

Rebekah Paczek is managing director of Snapdragon Consulting

enough time to really get this going, but the next iteration of the London Plan really needs to point towards progress for Sadiq Khan to deliver on his intentions. The Mayor will also look to invest in public transport where that can be used to unlock housing development and bring greater growth to the City so as well as looking to invest to de-risk housing delivery. Building Homes and Affordable Housing Sadiq Khan has once again reiterated his intention to intensify land use – to most people that means higher density development. At the same time he has signalled his intention to intervene in the market (a sentence which may strike fear into the heart of many a developer) to push forward sites and bring forward infrastructure. Exactly how he proposes to do this is unclear (he has however set out reasons as to why land may not come forward which mainly suggests that developers are to blame in every scenario). Expect more detail in the London Plan. At the same time, he has set out a framework to annoy many a local councillor and community members by shifting part of his focus from large sites to town centres, high streets and smaller infill sites. Greenbelt once more declared as sacrosanct – not great news for some of those with schemes in outer London boroughs which are dependent on greenbelt release. There is however, a subtle but important shift in the types of development which will be supported with building homes above schools specifically identified as a priority alongside consolidating industrial space. In terms of affordable, the Mayor has signalled his intention to invest in social rent and London Living Rent homes. A series of tests will also be established to ensure that homes are genuinely >>>

Issue 103 October-December 2017

OPINION: HOUSING POLICY | REBEKAH PACZEK

>>> affordable… His original 50 per cent affordable target rears its head again with a commitment to working towards this whilst currently fast tracking developments which meet existing housing targets. The challenge he has here is that a significant proportion of the major developments which he needs to get over the line to meet his housing figures, simply aren’t meeting his 35 per cent threshold for fast-tracking. If this continues, his delivery legacy will be woeful when it comes to re-election. The Mayor is also pushing for every home lost under Right to Buy to be replaced on a like for like basis. This will also apply to homes which are demolished – so will apply to every estate regeneration programme in London. Diversifying the Housebuilding Industry In this, Sadiq Khan pledges to make it easier for smaller housebuilders to access funds – blah, blah, blah. As many of you who are smaller housebuilders will know, the majority of government-led programmes to enable smaller housebuilders to access funds continue to have requirements and policies which effectively block smaller housebuilders from accessing the funds and are simply not set up to deal with the financial structures of smaller housebuilders. However, Sadiq Khan does appear to have recognised many of these obstacles and is putting in place a ‘Small Sites, Small Builders’ programme, piloted on public land to bring smaller builders into the mix, this will include a presumption in favour of planning on small sites. Interestingly, the document goes on to say that housing associations will be encouraged to develop through ‘strategic partnership’ – presumably this can only be with the private sector – and the Councils can look to borrow to develop. Again, this is reflective of the Housing White Paper and is a proposal which is widely supported across the industry. However, until some detail has been revealed as to how exactly this will be structured, it is difficult to get too excited about it. Not least as funding to build is not the only issue local authorities have, there are simply not the skills within local authorities to bring forward development and this will need addressing at the same time.

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As well as diversifying the industry, the Mayor wants to get communities involved in it so it is funding a Community Led Housing Hub to look at issues of estate regeneration, social infrastructure, design, place-making etc and to make the process more open and transparent. This includes encouraging local authorities to make viability assessments public and making public exactly how commuted sums in lieu of affordable housing are spent. Another one to bring joy to all in the industry on this bright and sunny day…

Improving Skills Well yes, good luck with that. Given that our Government under Mrs Maybe seems determined to hurtle headlong towards a post-Brexit immigration policy that is likely to cripple the construction industry, improving skills of UK workers is essential. I think we may have an issue with timing here and there is genuine concern over how the skills gap will be bridged in the short term. But, never fear, Sadiq Khan is going to provide ‘leadership and co-ordination’ to address this

issue. Phew, we can all settle down now, it’s going to be fine. Private Renting Landlord licensing, longer term tenancies, better protections and more support for PRS – that is basically it in a nutshell. Any objections? No, great, lets get that one done and move on then. Ultimately, the Mayor needs this to be successful if he is to deliver on his housing commitments. Whilst some of it is simply a reiteration of existing policies and other points require national legislation, there are aspects in there which are radical enough to make for much review and response from across the industry and particularly from local authorities. It is quite a weighty document and is open for consultation until 7th December – the link can be found here: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/ default/files/london_draft_housing_strategy.pdf. I expect this to eventually fall into the revised London Plan which is due out this Autumn. !

Issue 103 October-December 2017

21 12

OPINION: LEASEHOLD REFORM | CHARLES CAMPION

Leasehold reform needs care Leasehold reform is welcomed, but mustn’t stifle the growth of Community Land Trusts says Charles Campion In July this year, new proposals to cut out abuses of leasehold were announced by the government in an attempt to deliver a fairer, more transparent system for homebuyers. Communities Secretary Sajid Javid set out plans to ban new build houses being sold as leasehold, as well as restricting ground rents to as low as zero. Leasehold generally applies to flats with shared spaces, but developers have been increasingly selling houses on these terms. There are 1.2 million leasehold homes currently recorded in England and the number of leasehold sales is growing rapidly. This can often expose homebuyers to unreasonable and long-term financial abuse. Communities Secretary, Sajid Javid said: “It’s clear that far too many new houses are being built and sold as leaseholds, exploiting home buyers with unfair agreements and spiralling ground rents. Enough is enough. These practices are unjust, unnecessary and need to stop.” Whilst taking action against these particular practices has been broadly welcomed, it would be a mistake to simply ban leasehold outright. Leaseholds are essential to the innovative form of affordable housing provided through Community Land Trusts (CLTs). These are non-profit, community-led organisations that provide housing in perpetuity to local people at rates they can afford. In

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England and Wales there are now over 225 CLTs and it is estimated that by 2020 these communityowned organisations will be responsible for over 4,000 permanently affordable homes. To create affordability a CLT needs to receive initial subsidy in one form or another; be it free land, or financial grants from government, charities or benefactors. CLTs then use leasehold to separate the value of the land from that of the building upon it, meaning they are able to deliver genuinely affordable housing. CLTs are attractive because they can be established—like any non-profit organisation—by a group of engaged citizens with a common aim. Once land is owned by a CLT, it is protected from commercial development and any profits garnered from the land are re-invested in maintenance and/or capital expenditures for the benefit of local residents and the community. Our practice, JTP, has played a role in delivering homes for the East London Community Land Trust, the first CLT in London. In 2012, Boris Johnson as Mayor of London agreed to establish a CLT at the former St Clement’s Hospital in Bow. Galliford Try and Linden Homes, with JTP as architect and masterplanner, were selected as the Greater London Authority’s Development Partner to deliver the new neighbourhood. When complete, the regenerated hospital site will comprise a total of 252 homes, including 58 for ‘social rent’ and 23 sold to local people as CLT homes at prices linked to local wages. JTP was commissioned to engage local people to create a vision for the former workhouse. We held a series of Community Planning events at Bow Methodist Church where 350 local people created a new vision for the site through walkabouts, dialogue workshops, hands-on planning groups and report backs. The subsequent planning submission was approved unanimously at committee. This summer the first CLT residents moved into their new homes. The East London CLT is a truly innovative way of providing genuinely affordable housing in an area of London where house prices are beyond the reach of most people. This new model will provide the blueprint for future developments elsewhere.

Charles Campion is a partner at JTP, architects and masterplanners

Indeed, JTP is now working with Palace Green Homes and the local community to design a new garden village in Kennett, East Cambridgeshire. This village will include new homes, education provision, neighbourhood-scale commercial spaces such as a village shop, opportunities for the development of new and existing businesses, and generous public open spaces throughout the new neighbourhood. A proportion of the new homes will be genuinely affordable for people living and/or working in the parish, to be owned by the newly formed Kennett CLT. Our design team is now working in close partnership with Kennett CLT, Kennett Parish Council and the wider community to develop the proposals which are due to be submitted as an outline planning application. CLTs are an increasingly important component of the delivery of new homes to meet local need, and any government reform should not undermine the ability of the local community to come together and drive the creation of new, affordable homes where they are most needed. It’s a positive approach that puts housing provision within the hands of a community, and like many innovations in housing, CLTs need to be supported not stifled by one size fits all legislative proposals – and must be protected in any leasehold reform. n

Issue 103 October-December 2017

OPINION: DESIGN AND BUILD | JULIA PARK

Has design-and-build lost its way? For complex schemes, it makes sense to bring in construction expertise early. But it must be early if it’s to be a collaborative relationship, and it must deliver a building that is faithful to the design says Julia Park

First published in BDonline with kind consent

Historians suggest that Design and Build dates back 5,000 years to Ancient Egypt, where the design and construction of the pyramids was reputedly overseen by a ‘Master Builder’. Allegedly, it continued to work well until the Renaissance, when architects decided they wanted their own profession – distinct from the builder. Here in its current form, it stems from the early 1980s. The first D&B contract was published by the JCT in 1981. There is widespread agreement that its main purpose was to protect the ‘employer’ (usually a public body), by placing responsibility for the whole process with a single party – invariably now the builder, not the architect. Increasingly, Design and Build is being blamed for the complete opposite – fragmenting responsibility to the point where it is so difficult to hold anyone accountable that redress is almost impossible. In the wake of Grenfell, the RIBA has suggested that this form of procurement must fall within the terms of reference of the public inquiry, and the Association of Consultant Architects has expressed concern about the diminishing role of the architect: ‘While not being a specialist in any aspect of the construction of buildings, the architect is trained to understand the essentials of the functioning of buildings and to take a holistic view of both the building and the process of construction. We believe that this role is being undervalued and disrupted by a fragmentation of responsibility through changes to the process of procurement with the multiplicity of decision makers involved in this process. The independent role, standing sufficiently outside of the commercial pressures on a project, which was traditionally vested in the profession has all but been dismembered, notably with much public procurement. It is not certain that such a continuity and breadth of involvement would ensure that a disaster would never happen, but we believe that it most certainly would substantially reduce the risk’.1

As well as simplifying responsibility, it was intended to save time and provide earlier cost certainty (by allowing processes to overlap) and reduce conflict (by encouraging collaboration between the

Planning in London

designer and the builder). It all sounds eminently sensible but the more you think about it, the less realistic it seems, given the way that projects unfold in practice and what motivates the various parties. Like most clients, housing providers want to get through planning as quickly as possible and with minimum up-front expenditure on fees. Many are reluctant even to appoint structural and M&E consultants pre-planning, let alone a contractor, but they all want to see lots of detail, including fullyfurnished, individual, internal layouts. When the columns and ventilation equipment finally start to be overlaid on the plans, the majority of layouts will need to be amended, if not re-designed. Post-planning and with support from the design team, the Employer’s Agent (often a quantity surveyor) produces the all-important Employer’s Requirements (ERs). This is often a vast document, intended to describe how the building should perform but with as little information as possible about what that actually means to avoid tying down the bidding contractors. When the contract is awarded, the successful bidder (usually the cheapest) starts to explain how he, or she (I live in hope…) intends to build the building for the bargain price that put him/her in pole position. Where the design has been predicated on the use of particular products or construction methods, this will often be caveated in the ERs by the words ‘equal and approved’. As we know to our cost, the alternatives offered are frequently not ‘equal’, but noticing, and then proving that, often seems too difficult for the client or their agent, so they are ‘approved’ by default. The Contractor’s Proposals may be more radical. Increasingly I think they should, and will, but trying to retrofit a design to the millimetre precision and logistical constraints of craneable pods is a million times harder than designing it to suit the system in the first place. In reality, either the result will be a compromise, or the designer will need to spend double the time it should have taken. In allowing all this to happen, we seem to have forgotten two things; firstly that good designers are always think-

Julia Park, head of housing research, Levitt Bernstein

ing about how to build something as they design it; and secondly, that planning approval is permission for the building shown on the approved drawings, not something faintly similar. Arguably, the best way to protect the design is for the design team to be novated, but it’s not always easy to switch allegiance or work to a new set of priorities, particularly if you are undertaking the conflicted role of quality monitor to the employer in parallel. Contractors are not always pleased either – and why would they be? Many have tried and tested relationships with executive architects who charge (and argue) less. The package that gets handed over is poorly defined too. Take one example; now that accessibility requirements have been taken into the Building Regulations, we don’t need to prove compliance until post-planning. But the new rules for wheelchair housing are very complicated. Even if our clients were willing to wait, we couldn’t risk the executive architects coming back and saying they were unable to produce a compliant layout in the empty footprint we passed on. Suppose we had, and they were right, how would that work in terms of liability? Design and Build can work really well, but the idea of asking someone to take responsibility for an initial design they didn’t produce seems fundamentally problematic; almost as unpalatable as asking someone to hand over their initial design to a third party whose main aim is to build it as cheaply as possible. Overall, it has tended to distance architects from the construction stage and made us less inclined to think about buildability. That does the profession no favours. Clients are increasingly concerned that they >>>

OPINION: HOUSING POLICY | SHABANA ANWAR

More homes for Londoners The Mayor is using carrot and stick to incentivise developers says Shabana Anwar In his new supplementary planning guidance (SPG), “Homes for Londoners – Affordable Housing and Viability” published on 16 August 2017, the Mayor of London, sets out a carrot and stick approach to incentivising developers to help him meet his long-term aim for half of new homes in London to be affordable by increasing the amount of affordable housing delivered through the planning system and bringing forward more public land for affordable homes. The aims of the SPG are stated to be to: • increase the amount of affordable housing delivered through the planning system; • embed the requirement for affordable housing into land values; and • make the viability process more consistent and transparent. The detailed guidance sets out a new ‘threshold’ based approach to viability for development applications where 10 or more homes are proposed, with projects following one of two routes: either the ‘Fast-Track Route’ or the ‘Viability Tested Route’ depending on whether their affordable housing offering is greater or smaller than 35 per cent, with the aim of rewarding projects which are delivering more.If a development meets or >>>

are not getting the sort of quality they expected and ask us to go much further with the ERs than we should. We’re caught between wanting to do all we can to protect design quality, and knowing that our fees will be stretched with no guarantee of a good outcome as this relies heavily on the experience and tenacity of the Employer’s Agent. It’s a vital role but often a thankless one. 1 For small or straightforward buildings, the traditional, architect-led contract has a lot going for it. For more complicated schemes, it does make sense to bring in construction expertise early. But surely that’s the key? It must be early if it’s to be a collaborative relationship, and it must be geared to a process that delivers a building that is faithful to the design, offers accountability and longterm value for money, and allows everyone to make a bit of profit. Evidence suggests that’s not what Design and Build is doing. ! 1

ACA, quoted in Planning in London, issue 102, July 2017.

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exceeds 35 per cent affordable housing without public subsidy (grant, public loans) or 50 per cent where it is on public land without grant, then it can follow the ‘Fast Track Route’ which as the name suggests means that developers are not required to submit viability information at the application stage, and applications are subject to review mechanisms only if an agreed level of progress on implementation has not been achieved within two years of permission being granted or as agreed with the local planning authority (LPA). If a scheme does not meet the 35 per cent threshold without public subsidy, developers will be required to follow a ‘Viability Tested Route’ and submit detailed viability information which will “be scrutinised and treated transparently” and will be subject to two reviews (an ‘Early Stage Review’ and a ‘Late Stage Review’). The SPG also contains some much needed clarity and guidance on viability assessments which have been the source of debate regarding their content and disclosure of what developers consider to be commercially sensitive information with a number of Information Commissioner decisions and subsequent appeals to the First tier Tribunal on this subject in recent years. There is a marked shift towards full disclosure with the guidance emphasising the importance of transparency and making it clear that regardless of the viability model used, there “must be no hidden calculations or assumptions in the model. This will allow officers to vary assumptions to ascertain impact on the conclusions. Without this the LPA and Mayor cannot properly assess the validity of the appraisal and the assumptions used to underpin the affordable housing offer”. Whilst a developer will have the opportunity to argue that “limited elements” of the viability appraisal should be confidential, the onus is on the developer to make the case. There will only be very exceptional cases where “legitimate reasons for keeping limited elements of viability information confidential. For this to be the case the LPA, or the Mayor where relevant, would need to be convinced that the public interest in maintaining the exception outweighs the public interest in disclosing the infor-

Shabana Anwar is a partner at Bircham Dyson Bell

mation”. “Build to Rent” developments are subject to further specific guidance within the SPG as the Mayor believes that Build to Rent developments can make a particular contribution to increasing housing supply, being more robust to changes in house prices and beneficial in attracting investment into London’s housing market. Khan made some pretty bold promises for solving London’s housing crisis during the Mayoral election campaign including a commitment for 50 per cent of all the new homes to be “genuinely affordable”. This SPG aims to assist in delivering on this promise but it is not a promise which will be easy to fulfil when put simply, not enough homes are being built. The 2013 Strategic Housing Market Assessment (part of the evidence base for the London Plan) identifies a need for 25,600 additional affordable dwellings per year between 2015 and 2035, representing more than half of the projected total housing need for London of (a minimum) 49,000 new homes per year during this timeframe. Whilst Khan is to be applauded for taking positive steps to increase the number of affordable homes for Londoners, and the clarity around viability assessment contents is welcomed, the SPG may well end up being more of a stick then a carrot. The new guidance could have the unintended consequence of reducing overall housing delivery and amount of affordable housing, thereby exasperating the housing crisis. The SPG makes it difficult for developers to revise their initial affordable housing calculations to reflect the change in market conditions and economic circumstances. This in turn could result in housing schemes not being bought forward or those that have got consent, being abandoned. !

Issue 103 103 October-December October-December 2017 2017 Issue

25 19

OPINION: HOUSING ESTATES | ADAM COOK

The conception of housing estates Adam Cook asks has the concept of housing estates become confused in the minds of those who plan for health and wellbeing? perceived apartheid of social housing, mentioned at the talk. A phenomenon was discussed concerning the reality of working class life, referring to how people are able to adapt to difficult circumstances. In a potential critique of statistical preoccupation with indices of multiple deprivation (IMDs) as a fair measure, was provided in research and analysis quoted at the talk in which an English underclass is identified. This adapts to and lives in extreme poverty and is resistant to the political efforts of the left to improve it. From the environmental perspective determinant on citizen wellbeing, parallels thinking originating in early Peckham Health Centre studies, where indices of poverty and deprivation, correlate poor public health. This was contrasted with former Prime Minister David Cameron naming the 200 worst estates that need to be turned around and on which community development trust and self-building are potential regeneration alternatives. For example already successful grass roots led housing estate based community energy schemes and local authority led estate regeneration in Camden and Islington, in London, with a commitment to civic engagement in practice. At the talk a challenge was raised, that there is a housing shortage at all and instead the problem concerns under occupancy of social homes. Whilst measures taken to free up council social homes for use by the homeless leads to the ‘bedroom tax’, in which the effect of economic policy

Neave Brown, whose projects include the Alexandra Road Estate in Camden [PICTURED LEFT], has been awarded the RIBA's highest individual honour for his pioneering contribution to social housing.

Planning in London

Adam Cook is a chartered landscape architect and planner

may ignore its potential social and cultural effects, squeezing older people out of their community, into smaller accommodation at remote locations. The author spoke well of the right to buy and sense of ownership with responsibility this brought for estate residents. This tends to agree with research which has classified tenants; leaseholders and freeholders under their sense of responsibility, towards their living environment, which increases proportionally accordingly to their stakeholder interest. Returning to an interest in 1970-80’s localism, the writer Gillian Darley asked at the talk: ‘What happened to the 1980’s Neighbourhood Offices in Islington, London. In response local government civic decentralisation, the Localism of the 1970’s Wilson government, were met by the Thatcher government’s market based economic philosophy (post-1979) and the Private Finance Initiative PFI, set up Arms Length Management Organisations ALMO’s. ALMOs took over an outsourced the housing function. The purpose built neighbourhood centres with a signature postModern style architecture, which Darley referred to, were made redundant and rationalised into new uses. So the talk revealed varying conceptions about housing estates, either as a socioeconomic experiment or as part of a more inclusive 197080’s civic society and latterly one where economic determinism is favoured. Overall this leaves estate residents facing both public policy and economics and one where revisiting New Localism in the 21th century and neighbourhood scale regeneration is a potential and in some case has already started in neighbourhood level placemaking activity. n

Written following a talk held at the London Review Bookshop on 27 July 2017, where the author Lynsey Hanley, was interviewed by a Guardian Journalist, Dawn Foster, coinciding with the re-launch of the book Housing EstatesAn Intimate history. The issue of social mobility and housing estates was correlated by the author’s personal experience of living at Chelmsley Wood Estate, Birmingham. The author talked about personal experience imparting an unspoken knowledge about the physical spatial constraints, of both self and aspirations, which reportedly affected the mind of a housing estate resident. As a product of post-WWII development planning, built and financed by the government, centrally and locally, thus these estates consist a form of socio-economic planning, where Lloyd George’s pledge to provide ‘Homes Fit for Heros’ aimed at the Working Class, was modified after 1945/ 1949 to provide mixed accommodation, to cater for a range of social classes. This has developed further in the new urbanism agenda GLA policy like London a Compact City, 2003 which promotes mixed income high density residential mixed use development as urban concentration within London boundaries. Whilst contemporary socioeconomic conditions in 1960- 70’s estates might be a direct result of the 1977 Labour government’s decision to prioritise homelessness, as eligibility for public housing which have become ghettos and has created a

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Seminar + book

Book only

The Use of Land and Buildings: current legal issues When? 10.00 – 13.00 17 November 2017

The Essential Guide to the Use of Land and Buildings under the Planning Acts

Where? RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London

by Martin Goodall, Keystone Law

How much? £140 if you book before 31 October – save £25 on the full price of £165

A definitive handbook covering all aspects of the use of land and buildings.

Price includes attendance at the seminar plus the print and digital editions of the forthcoming The Essential Guide to the Use of Land and Buildings under the Planning Acts on publication

Publication due November 2017 Pre-publication offer: £50 + free digital edition <285 ',6&2817 &2'( ,6 3L/8VH

Get the answers to all these questions and more • • • • •

what are the legal principles governing material changes of use? how do the 4-year rule and 10-year rule work in practice? how does the ‘second bite’ provision operate? precisely what does a Lawful Development Certificate cover? what are the latest development in permitted changes of use?

Attend the seminar and the book is included in the price

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ANDY ROGERS

Losing the plot on conservation areas Have conservation areas become devalued by over-use? asks Andy Rogers 2017 is the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Civic Amenities Act and the establishment of the first conservation area in Stamford, Lincolnshire. The aim at that time was to counteract the wholesale demolition and redevelopment of town centre and innercity areas during the 1950s and 1960s, with regeneration being directed in an idealistic way using proper resources and considered management tools. But the system has, almost from its outset, been far more concerned with preservation than enhancement and has suffered very severely - even more so today - from lack of funding. The private member’s Bill introduced by Duncan Sandys as President of the Civic Trust in June 1966, which became the Civic Amenities Act of 1967, followed a conference in Cambridge chaired by Richard Crossman (then the Minister of Housing and Local Government) at the end of 1965, which had discussed introducing legislation to protect historic areas. It was intended that five ‘heritage towns’ would be subject to special surveys and planning treatment to establish how far (if at all) the aspirations of local authorities, preservation/amenity societies and commercial developers could be reconciled. (Even at the start resources were a problem and King’s Lynn dropped out because agreement could not be reached between the Ministry, the Borough Council and Norfolk County Council on funding for the pilot study.) The initial concept was geared very much to the selection of key areas with a strongly definable character and the allocation of resources to manage the development and enhancement of this character. The conservation area ideal was enacted by Harold Wilson’s Labour government at a time of expansion and progress. The AJ (18th January 1967) recognised a ‘New Task’: “The most valuable areas of our historic heritage must be staked out before they disappear or are altered beyond recognition. Our policies

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must be to protect and enhance them and, where rebuilding and modernisation are needed, to strive for a modern quality that is equal to the best of the past…” Current designation procedures are set out in the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990, and have remained basically the same since the 1971 Planning Act. Local authorities are required to identify areas of special architectural or historic interest, the character or appearance of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance. (Note the use of the word ‘or’ - but that’s another column altogether!) Designation may be done by planning subcommittee and there is no specific requirement for public consultation or local publicity, although they are recommended. Section 71 of the Act requires authorities to formulate and publish proposals for the preservation/enhancement of parts of their demise that are to be conservation areas, to hold a public meeting to consider such plans, and to have regard to any views concerning the proposals that may be expressed. This is rarely done, particularly if the conservation area has been in existence for a number of years and is simply being extended - very often beyond the ‘strongly definable character’ that prompted designation in the first place. It was estimated that “2,500 towns and villages… can be identified in these islands and there might be half as many conservation areas, large and small, to be defined”. By the end of 1968, 63 authorities had already designated 220 areas and it was thought that “there may eventually be as many as 3,000 conservation areas throughout Britain”. But even today, no details or statistics are kept on their formation and it is impossible to be precise or to assess their real value to society. It is certainly likely that the authors of the Civic Amenities Act never anticipated the numbers now designated or that they would include an open field with a few trees in it (conservation area as designated by Canterbury City Council) or a collection of rather run-down holiday chalets (on the edge of Swansea). Over the past fifty years the idealism of

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation . – Edmund Burke, 1790

the concept has been dissipated by the creation of too many places not worthy of full conservation area status. Even high-quality areas that have been designated are often neglected by local planners in all but the purely negative aspects of development control - with no proper analysis of their character or plans for their improvement. It is far too common to have a planning application refused because of a proposal’s ‘harm’ to the character of its conservation area, but without any proper study or description of the character that one is supposed to safeguard having been prepared. The overall effect of the trend to designated ever wider and less meaningful or worthy areas has escalated to the point where many people are surprised to learn that their runof-the-mill properties are actually in a conservation area. The boundaries of numerous areas are so loosely drawn that they not longer have any logic or coherence. And over the years there have been recurring suggestions that conservation areas could be graded in importance, as are listed buildings, but none have been followed up. There is now little or no relationship between the aspirations of the original authors of the legislation, the mechanics of designation, and the problems of administration as experienced today. Although permitted development rights do exist in conservation areas (contrary to what many people believe), they are slightly more restrictive than elsewhere. Inevitably anomalies have arisen that can unwittingly

Conservation is a highly valuable (in contemporary terms) and dynamic process which by selective preservation creates new environments … whatever we do, environments are always in the process of becoming new. In whatever way we decide to control them, control [should be] creative . – Robert Adam, 1975

further devalue an area while at the same time creating frustration for occupants of poor-quality conservation areas who cannot as of right carry out the same simple improvements that are allowed to their neighbours located outside it. The principle that has been lost is that, unlike preservation which advocates leaving things undisturbed, conservation demands action to improve, manage and maintain quality. The creation and management of conservation areas should be used to encourage sustainable growth and the development of activities that have environmental protec-

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tion in a wider sense as a central tenet. This does not often happen any more because the idealism that once existed has been spread too thinly and is used too negatively. Earlier this year Civic Voice (formerly the Civic Trust) carried out a survey of members’ opinions about conservation areas. Laura Sandys, Vice-President of Civic Voice and Daughter of Lord Duncan Sandys, said: “Today there are over 10,000 conservation areas in the UK reflecting the popularity of this legislative tool in identifying and protecting our most valued historic places.” It would nevertheless be helpful if every conservation area was properly described and positively managed - as well as indeed being a high-quality historic place that is really worth protecting. n

ABOVE: Permitted development in a Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Conservation Area. The borough had attempted to have its entire demise designated as one vast CA, but this was rightly considered a step too far - much as, I suggest, the borough’s current attempt to remove pd rights across the entire borough for the conversion of offices to residential use. BELOW: Blackmores Grove Conservation Area, London Borough of Richmond upon Thames (designated because of its association with the author of Lorna Doone). The replacement sash window picturedwas refused planning permission in 2015 because it is not made of timber.

Issue 103 October-December 2017

BRIEFING | PLANNING PERFORMANCE

Major residential permissions up nine per cent, all else a bit flat Latest planning performance by English districts and London boroughs: Planning Applications in England: April to June 2017 OVERVIEW Between April to June 2017, district level planning authorities in England: • received 123,300 applications for planning permission, down five per cent on the corresponding quarter of 2016; • granted 98,700 decisions, down two per cent from the same quarter in 2016; this is equivalent to 88 per cent of decisions, unchanged on the same quarter of 2016; • decided 87 per cent of major applications within 13 weeks or the agreed time, up from 84 per cent a year earlier; • granted 12,200 residential applications, unchanged on a year earlier: 1,500 for major developments and 10,600 for minors; • granted 2,500 applications for commercial developments, down ten per cent on a year earlier; and • received 11,000 applications for prior approval for permitted development rights, down eight per cent from the same quarter of 2016. Of these, 1,400 applications were for changes to residential use, of which 1,000 were approved without having to go through the full planning process. In the year ending June 2017, district level planning authorities: • granted 384,000 decisions, up one per cent

from the figure for the year ending June 2016; • granted 50,100 decisions on residential developments: 6,600 for major developments and 43,500 for minors, up on the year ending June 2016 by nine per cent and five per cent respectively; and • granted 10,900 applications for commercial developments, down three per cent on the year ending June 2016. Planning applications During April to June 2017, authorities undertaking district level planning in England received 123,300 applications for planning permission, down five per cent on the corresponding quarter in 2016. In the year ending June 2017, authorities received 479,200 planning applications, unchanged on the year ending June 2016 (Live Tables P120/P132/P134 and Table 1). Planning decisions Authorities reported 112,000 decisions on planning applications in April to June 2017, a decrease of two per cent on the 114,300 decisions in the same quarter of the previous year. In the year ending June 2017, authorities decided 437,500 planning applications, an increase of one per cent compared to the year ending June 2016 (Live Tables P120/P133/P134 and Table 1).

Applications granted During April to June 2017, authorities granted 98,700 decisions, down two per cent from the same quarter in 2016. Authorities granted 88 per cent of all decisions, unchanged on the June quarter of 2016 (Live Tables P120/P133). Overall, 83 per cent of major and minor decisions were granted. The percentage of decisions granted varied widely between local planning authorities, ranging this quarter from 0 to 100 per cent for major developments, 48 to 100 per cent for minor developments and 60 to 100 per cent for other developments (Live Tables P120/P131). Over the 12 months to June 2017, 384,000 decisions were granted, up one per cent from the year to June 2016 (Live Tables P122/P132 and Table 1).Historical context Figure 1 and Table 1 show that, since 2005, the numbers of applications received, decisions made and applications granted have each followed a similar pattern. As well as the usual within- year pattern of peaks in the Summer and troughs in the Winter, there was a clear downward trend during the 2008 economic downturn, with figures remaining broadly level since then, albeit with numbers granted showing a slight upward trend, in line with the increase in the percentage of applications granted. Figure 1 shows that the numbers of applications received in recent years are some way below the peak in 2004/05. Historical figures for all district level decisions dating back to 2004 are set out in Live Table P120, with separate breakdowns for residential and commercial decisions being shown in Live Tables P120A and P120B respectively. These latter two tables are discussed below in the sections on residential and commercial decisions. Speed of decisions • In April to June 2017, 87 per cent of major applications were decided within 13 weeks or within the agreed time for Planning Performance Agreements (PPAs), Extensions of Time (EoTs) and Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), compared with 84 per cent in the June quarter 2016.

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RIGHT: Number of planning applications received, decided and granted by district level planning authorities

• In the June quarter of 2017, 85 per cent of minor applications and 91 per cent of other applications were decided within eight weeks or the agreed time. These figures show increases, compared with 80 per cent and 88 per cent a year earlier respectively. The percentage of decisions made in time varied widely between local planning authorities, ranging this quarter from 25 to 100 per cent for major developments, 25 to 100 per cent for minor developments and 15 to 100 per cent for other developments (Live Tables P120, P123 and P131). Because deciding an application on time can include the use of a performance agreement, the calculation of the proportion of decisions made within the agreed time was changed to include PPAs from April 2008 for major and some ‘other’ developments, and to also include agreed EoTs and EIAs from April 2013. Applications since April

Planning decisions by development type, speed of decision and local planning authority: January to March 2017 Table 131 can be found with all tables and figures here: https://goo.gl/E5ZVsv Source: CLG/ONS >>>

>>>

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Issue 103 October-December 2017

BRIEFING | PLANNING PERFORMANCE

>>> 2014 for minor developments and for changes of use, householder developments and advertisements can now also be recorded as having included a performance agreement. Because the most consistent reporting of agreements is for major applications, Figure 2 and Table 2 show, from 2008, numbers of decisions on major developments made involving a performance agreement, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of all decisions on major developments. Notwithstanding these definitional changes, there has been a marked increase in the use of agreements since early 2013, although the increases have slowed down in recent quarters turning into a small decrease, in absolute and percentage terms, in the latest quarter. In reality, this longer upward trend has been driven by both the additional scope for recording them and their additional use. The proportion of major decisions subject to an agreement was 59 per cent during April to June 2017, up from six per cent in the April to June quarter of 2014 (Table 2 and Live Table P131). The three final columns in Table P120 give corresponding figures for applications involving a planning agreement for all types of development (major, minor and â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; combined), showing numbers of decisions and percentages decided within time. In the quarter to June 2017, a total of

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24,800 decisions involving performance agreements were made, of which 21,800 (88 per cent) were decided on time. The notes to Table 120 describe how the scope of the information collected has changed over time, in terms of: i) the type of agreement; and ii) the type of development covered. Figure 3 and Reference Table 2 show that in the quarter to June 2017, 89 per cent of major development decisions involving performance agreements were made on time. In comparison, 85 per cent of major decisions not involving performance agreements were made within the statutory time limit of 13 weeks. Residential decisions The figures collected by the department are numbers of decisions on planning applications submitted to local planning authorities rather than the number of units included in each application, such as the number of homes in the case of housing developments. The Department supplements this information by obtaining statistics on housing permissions from a contractor. The latest figures show that permission for 304,000 homes was given in the rolling year to 31 March 2017, compared to a revised figure of 281,000 homes granted permission in the rolling year to 31 December 2016. The number of homes granted permission during the rolling year

to 31 March 2017 was 15 per cent higher than in the rolling year to 31 March 2016. Figures for previous quarters are revised to ensure that any duplicates are removed, and also to include any projects that local planning authorities may not have processed: they are therefore subject to change. These figures are provided to give contextual information, and have not been designated as National Statistics. Regarding the figures reported by local planning authorities to the Department on PS1/2 returns, in April to June 2017, 16,300 decisions were made on applications for residential developments, of which 12,200 (75 per cent) were granted. The total number of residential decisions made increased by one per cent from the June quarter 2016, with the number granted remaining unchanged. The number of major residential decisions granted decreased by two per cent to 1,500 whereas the number of minor residential decisions granted remained unchanged at 10,600 (Live Tables P120A, P123 and P135). In the year ending June 2017, authorities granted, 6,600 major and 43,500 minor residential applications, up by nine and five per cent respectively on the year ending June 2016 (Live Tables P120A and P136).

Commercial decisions In April to June 2017, 2,700 decisions were made on applications for commercial developments, of which 2,500 (91 per cent) were granted. The total number of commercial decisions decreased by 11 per cent on the same quarter of 2016. In the year ending June 2017, 10,900 applications for commercial developments were granted, down three per cent on the year ending June 2016 (Live Table P120B). Historically, numbers of major and minor residential decisions dropped sharply during 2008 (particularly for minor decisions) but have been increasing since 2012. Numbers of commercial decisions made decreased sharply during last recession, and have since stabilised at around 2,100 per year for major and 11,000 per year for minor commercial developments. In 2016/17 numbers of minor commercial decisions were at about 45 per cent of the pre-recession peak, with the numbers of major developments being at about 62 per cent (Live Tables P120A and P120B, Figure 4). The percentages of major and minor residential decisions granted increased between 2008/09 (from about 65 per cent for each type) and 2010/11 to about 80 per cent for majors and about 75 per cent for minors, and have stabilised since then. The percentages of major and minor commercial decisions granted have been increasing steadily, from 88 and 86 per cent respectively in 2008/09, to 94 and 91 per cent respectively in 2016/17 (Live Tables P120A and P120B, Figure 5). Householder developments Householder developments are those developments to a house which require planning permission such as extensions, loft conversions and conservatories (more details are in the Definitions section). The number of decisions on householder developments decreased by one per cent, from 59,700 decisions in the quarter ending June 2016 to 59,100 decisions in the corresponding quarter in 2017, when they accounted for 53 per cent of all decisions. Authorities granted 91 per cent of these applications and decided 92 per cent within eight weeks or the agreed time (Live Table P123). Prior approvals for permitted developments Following the creation in May 2013 of some additional permitted development right categories (see the Definitions section) and consultation with local authorities, the department increased the level of detailed information on prior approvals for permitted developments collected on the PS1 return with effect from 1 April 2014.

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The results for the latest quarter for which they have been collected (April to June 2017) are included in Live Tables PDR1 (local authority level figures) and PDR2 (England totals). Of the 11,000 applications reported in the April to June quarter of 2017, Taking i) granted applications and ii) those for which prior approval was not required together, 8,700 applications were approved without having to go through the full planning process, down 11 per cent from a year earlier . Within an overall decrease of eight per cent in the reported total number of applications between April and June 2016 and April and June 2017: â&#x20AC;˘ larger householder extensions decreased by 11 per cent â&#x20AC;˘ office to residential changes dropped by 18 per cent; and â&#x20AC;˘ agricultural to residential changes dropped by 22 per cent. Changes made to the PS1 return from 1 October 2016 have made it possible to identify the total number of permitted development right applications made for changes to residential use. Figures for this are given in Live Table PDR1, which show that a total of 1,400 applications for changes to residential use were reported in April to June 2017, of which 1,000 (70 per cent) were approved without having to go through the full planning process. The overall acceptance rate for the thirteen quarters between the collection of detailed data started in April 2014 and the end of June 2017 is 81 per cent. The rate initially dropped from 85 per cent in the quarter ending June 2014 to 79 per

cent in the quarter ending December 2014. In 2015 and 2016 the acceptance rate stabilised at around 82 per cent and was 79 per cent in the quarter ending June 2017 (Live Table PDR2). Overall during the thirteen quarters ending June 2017, district planning authorities reported 130,300 applications for prior approvals for permitted developments. For 74,400 (57 per cent) of them prior approval was not required, 31,600 (24 per cent) were granted and 24,300 (19 per cent) were refused (Figure 6). To put these recent figures into context, Live Table P128 and Figure 7 show how the number of determination applications received remained broadly stable at around 5,000 to 8,000 per year from 2004/05 to 2012/13, but approximately doubled to 15,700 in 2013/14, following the creation of the new permitted development right categories in May 2013. Since then, there have been 36,500 applications in 2014/15, 41,400 in 2015/16 and 41,500 in 2016/17. The quarterly pattern since April 2014 reflects a combination of both: i) the introduction of new permitted development right categories in May 2013 and April 2015; and ii) the seasonal peaks and troughs that have previously also been observed for planning applications, as shown earlier in this release, in Figure 1 (Live Table PDR 2 and Figure 7). This significant increase in numbers of applications appears to be consistent with the annual increases in the number of dwellings added to the net housing supply through change of use of 65 per cent and 48 per cent during 2014-15 and 2015-16 respectively. n

Issue 103 October-December 2017

NEIL PARKYN

Satanic Mills or Silicon Roundabouts? Neil Parkyn ponders the history of and trends in the design of the workplace You can never entirely forget potent images of the past, even when cosying up to a microchip. Denizens of industrial nostalgia will readily recall those proud company letterheads emblazoned with suitably smoking chimneys, quite likely modelled on the towers of Umbria. Readers of the Meccano Magazine will recall further tools of industry, such as the giant transporter cranes, which for some reason their young sisters never got to build. All these wonders somehow all got lumped into the ‘World of Work’. Or archive images of Henry Ford’s production lines vanishing in perspective; row upon row of bombers being assembled in what seemed buildings of truly pharaonic dimensions in Southern California – such was the visible heft of industry when it hummed and belched. ‘Work’ was something to be left at the factory gates: stern, demanding, even dangerous. Fragments of Britain’s Industrial Heritage remain, repurposed as office space or whatever, in the context of us having more computing power held in one hand than could be mustered by a floor full of early machines. Such step changes and accelerating innovations have become entirely routine, in their own way Meccano Marvels. The huge production lines power on, but with ever further levels of miniaturisation and precision. Home or Office..or both ? Stepping aside from manufacturing plants, which will certainly survive in one form or other, in the best hands winning awards for their architecture, it’s well worth exploring the very different ways in which the Big Boys of the internet approach the challenge of getting themselves headquartered. It’s a rather pesky problem, as it turns out, and London is seeing examples of it Neil Parkyn is a retired architect-planner living in France. A former member of the RTPI and RSA Councils, he was a director of Colin Buchanan and Partners.

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being played out. But first, a little history. Historians of the office workspace will recall the various phases of evolution from the much heralded ‘home office’ which could breed a sense of isolation and too many mugs of tea, through the (often literal) jungle of the Open Office with its micro worlds of plants, screens and conflicting conversations, to the current plethora of solutions which move beyond the set piece, freestanding ‘Country House’ model for corporate headquarters. In their own right, the office campus and business park are rather fascinating products of an evolution from the early scatters of pitched roof pavilions, with their hinterland of open parking on the model of a mini World’s Fair or an architectural zoo. The parade of white hulls along the skyline, rigged with tension wires and jaunty roofscapes, recalled a line of proud Dreadnoughts at Scapa Flow. This generation gave way to building formats which responded to the call for less formality in their composition. There were some very compelling assemblies of contiguous but articulated modules based on analysis of the optimum sizes and office working groups. Notable architecture emerged from this accretive process in the hands of Arup Associates and others and the ways in which office groups needed to be organised, generated a distinct formality which gave these buildings a scale and presence of their own, self-

sufficient but not banal or monolithic. In parallel came the neutral chunks or quantums of office floorspace, packaged up in wrappings of almost couture-like elegance, redolent of corporate cool and well calibrated understatement. Yankee architects looked on with approval that the Brits seemed to have got the point of how to present forward-looking organisations. The Business Park duly evolved through distinct generations, their progress codified in workplace studies by, most notably, DEGW. Swiftly Moving On In London, we are far from the Elysian fields of the corporate campus. There is no shortage of wheezes on offer to create or rework spaces for the those start-ups and others clustering around Shoreditch and Silicon Roundabout. Existing outworn stock revives with stylish touches ; deft inserts fill the cracks and the rooftops. Scarcity apart, the mechanics are well sorted and the result is dense but dynamic, yet here as elsewhere in other ripe locations in London, this is micro stuff. There’s a hum and a buzz beloved of true urbanists – and even and sandwich specials on Fridays. The really tough nut to crack is how to insert a giant, single gesture corporate headquarters into the urban fabric of inner London. We don’t have the tabula rasa of Apple’s HQ site in Southern

LETTERS

Just one publishable letter this issue and from a fan too. His regular column is on the preceding page! From N Parkyn (M. LeParc) Message du 11/07/17 Dear Editor I got up early to do some necessary Ironing (yes, Sir, that's what you do with the iron-thingy…) and I was entirely but very happily distracted by the latest issue of Planning in London. With all due modesty I realise that there are many first rate pieces on important CURRENT topics...excellent graphics, relaxed editorial tone, not ENTIRELY dominated by the boys and girls of 16BS*… What's Not To Like? Pleased to have my own 'petit coin' amongst your pages. Félicitations! Your columnisy at large Neil Parkyn

*16 Bedford Square, onetime home of Shankland Cox & Associates

>>> California, where Foster can deploy his giant ring building with the panache of a Boulée or a Ledoux, knowing its closed perfection will perhaps be visible from Space ? Such ‘timeless’, abstract, universal form simply couldn’t cut the mustard at Kings Cross. So what are we to make of a building that will consolidate over 7000 Google staff in a sinuous linear form at King’s Cross. Its designers, Heatherwick Studios with the Danish megafirm of Bjerke Ingels, propose to create nothing conventionally monumental but a building more ‘relaxed’ and flexible. They have broken down the huge quantum of floorspace into a series of layers, nodes, and decentralised clusters of breakout and back- up spaces.. It will be an internal/external landscape that studiously avoids one-shot gestures. There seems no neat formality about it to please the conventional corporate eye. It’s not composed of self-contained cells which are then combined to form a whole.

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Marks Barfield Architects co-founder David Marks, best known for designing the London Eye with his wife and practice partner Julia Barfield, has died, aged 64 The architect worked for Richard Rogers before founding the London-based firm with Barfield in 1989. Together they created a series of well-known landmarks, including the London Eye, the Treetop Walkway at Kew, the British Airways i360 in Brighton and the University of Cambridge Primary School, the first piece in the North West Cambridge development which opened last year. Speaking to The Sunday Times in July 2016, Marks said: ‘Architects don’t stop, they just go on building things until they run out of breath.’

This seems to go far beyond the work-as-play cliché of the statutory pinball machine and sporty colours to wow staff and clients. All the familiar architectural devices to animate sheer bulk are on show – cascading, expressed floor levels, timber cladding, roof gardens. These are essentially ges-

tures to animate and lighten the volume. Google Kings Cross could be an extraordinary building. On this site the stakes could scarcely be higher. But will the punters out there be content with envious and tantalising peeps into the World of Google? At this stage the jury is still out. n

Issue 103 October-December 2017

BRIEFING

CLIPBOARD Improving the affordability of Crossrail 2 Chris Grayling, secretary of state for transport, and the Mayor Sadiq Khan have set out the next steps for Crossrail 2 which is intended to serve stations across London, linking Surrey in the south with Hertfordshire in the north by an underground tunnel. They say: “While London has shown how it could pay for half of the scheme over its life, the mayor and transport secretary want to see how London could fund half of the scheme during construction". The statement, which follows a meeting between Grayling and Khan on 18 July, said that the pair had "agreed a way forward in the coming months to examine ways to improve affordability while maximising the key benefits of the scheme, learning lessons from Crossrail 1, ahead of this autumn’s Budget". Grayling said that “a fresh public consultation would gather views to improve the scheme and clarify the position around the safeguarded route. I am a supporter of Crossrail 2, but given its price tag we have to ensure that we get this right”.

The only answer is not up The Mayor of London has been urged to stop ‘forcing’ high-rise homes on councils. “London does need more housing, but I just don’t believe that the only answer is up”, said Richmond council leader, Lord True. “The Capital must stop building up”. Retiring as leader of the Council he urged mayor Sadiq Khan to stop GLA planners pushing higherrise developments and overturning local planning authorities’ decisions that seek to cap the height of buildings. Lord True wrote to Khan about proposed future high-rise developments in London. Richmond Council has strict planning policies on new high-rise buildings to ‘protect and respect the distinctive heritage and special character of the borough’. For Richmond borough, a ‘tall’ building is defined as one of 18 metres in height or higher, or six storeys and above. And new ‘tall’ buildings are only considered acceptable close to Richmond and Twickenham stations. The policies

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Southwark Tube ticket hall saved – Richard MacCormac’s rotunda, the ticket hall at Southwark Undergound station, has been reprieved in new plans by TfL after calls that its reconstruction should be made a planning condition.

also define ‘taller’ buildings as those significantly taller than neighbouring buildings, but less than 18 metres – or below six storeys – in height. As such, new ‘taller’ buildings are only potentially appropriate in the centres of Richmond and Twickenham, according to the borough’s planning policies.

Design advocates appointed by Khan Alison Brooks, David Adjaye and Sadie Morgan are among the architects appointed by London mayor Sadiq Khan as design advocates to work with City Hall and local councils as part of an initiative to improve design in the capital. The Good Growth by Design programme is to set ambitious design standards, undertake design reviews, place designers and planners with local authorities for up to a year to help plug the skills gap councils are facing and support diversity in the built environment sector. Khan said: “London is facing unprecedented

population growth and with that comes challenging work but also amazing opportunities to deliver a city that is socially integrated, sustainable, healthier, safer and with a world class public realm. “We must embrace London’s rapid growth with both hands and take this chance to use good architecture and planning to make a real difference to the lives of Londoners. And this is a chance to learn from past mistakes, some of which are still dotted across our city, and blight the lives of the communities that live in them. “One of the way I want to apply the principles of Good Growth is to re-balance development in London away from the high-price homes in central London towards more genuinely affordable homes for all Londoners. The full list David Adjaye; Hiro Aso; Joanna Averley; Rachel Bagenal; Clara Bagenal George; Claire Bennie; Dinah Bornat; Andy von Bradsky; Alison Brooks; Adam Brown; Peter Coleman; Russell Curtis; John >>>

BRIEFING

Dales; Irene Djao-Rakitine; Alex Ely; Liza Fior; Kathryn Firth; Daisy Froud; Alice Fung; Roger Hawkins; Wayne Hemingway; Dan Hill; Tom Holbrook; Rory Hyde; Indy Johar; Dipa Joshi; Paul Karakusevic; Adam Khan; Lynn Kinnear; Vincent Lacovara; Richard Lavington; Christopher Lee; Julian Lewis; Holly Lewis; Laura Mazzeo; Sadie Morgan; Peter Murray; Lucy Musgrave; Fabienne Nicholas; David Ogunmuyiwa; Elsie Owusu; Julia Park; Sowmya Parthasarathy; Manisha Patel; Sunand Prasad; Hilary Satchwell; Monica von Schmalensee; Fiona Scott; Neil Smith; Maria Smith; Paloma Strelitz; David West.

Uplift for Oxford Street The late Bryan Avery, whose moving memorial service at St Brides, Fleet Street was earlier this month, last year proposed an alternative to Sadiq Khan’s plans to pedestrianise Oxford Street. His scheme pictured ABOVE RIGHT features an ’overpass’ – accessed via short concealed ramps – running from Marble Arch to Tottenham Court Road, with laminated glass on the underside, and supported by polished stainless-steel columns. Buses and taxis would drive along the overpass, which would consist of two lanes for traffic and a third for vehicles to collect passengers, while pedestrians would walk along Oxford Street beneath. Lifts and stairs from street level would provide access to the bus stops. The London mayor pledged to pedestrianise the shopping avenue during his election campaign as part of a strategy to tackle air pollution. Valerie Shawcross, deputy mayor for transport, has said the plans would be fully implemented by 2020. But Avery has said that the street provides a major route from east to west London, via the centre, and losing that transport link would have a ‘big impact’. He added that there was not enough capacity in the underground, and the upcoming Crossrail development, to remove buses and taxis. According to Robert Davis, then deputy leader and cabinet member for the built environment at Westminster Council, there are 75 bus routes along the street and around 270 buses per hour. Avery

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thought that finding different routes for these buses would not provide easy access to the street. ‘Moving buses to either of those alternative routes would place them too far away to serve the street,’ he said, ‘and any intermediate routes through Mayfair and Soho, or Marylebone and Fitzrovia, would be hugely difficult on such narrow streets and would undoubtedly be fiercely contested by local residents. ‘It would also delay and disrupt the bus services even more than they are today.’ Avery said his alternative proposals would also provide ‘brightly lit’ and ‘reflective’ surfaces to ‘bounce the light’, as well as a rain canopy for shoppers. He said that because the plans present difficulties around Oxford Circus – for example, by blocking the view down Regent Street – the overpass could come down via a ramp at this point before going up again.: ‘The only conclusion I can come to is that pedestrianisation is the ideal but if there isn’t another way of replacing or rerouting the 75 bus services then they need to be accommodated within the street.’ Robert Davis has said that major obstacles stand in the way of Khan’s pedestrianisation project. ‘We realised that doing nothing is not an option and had five or six options for Oxford Street which we were modelling with the last mayor,’ he said. ‘The problem is where do you move the buses and taxis? If you move them into, say, Wigmore Street – which is already chock-a-block – then you are just moving the problem elsewhere.’ Avery’s plans are a revamped version of ones he drew up for the world-famous shopping street in 1983. The previous proposal, reported in The Times and The Evening Standard, was recommended for further study by Westminster Council but never received backing.

‘Top-to-bottom’ review of social housing Communities secretary Sajid Javid has announced a ‘top-to-bottom’ review of social housing in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire. Announcing the green paper at the National Housing Federation conference in Birmingham on19 September Javid said that the west London tower block blaze had highlighted the divide between rich and poor. He said his green paper would be ‘most substantial report of its kind for a generation’ and ‘kick off a nationwide conversation on social housing’. New RIBA president Ben Derbyshire welcomed the announcement, describing Javid’s talk as the ’most positive social housing speech from a senior Conservative in many years’. ‘I am pleased the Government appear to have recognised the need for a fundamental rethink of social housing and hope that these warm words will be accompanied by the necessary resources,’ he added. ‘Good quality housing is an essential component to improving life chances and tackling low social mobility. We will eagerly await the Government’s details on Right to Buy and social rents and what may be expected of housing associations in terms of building homes.’

Global ranking of EU financial centres 1 London, 18 Luxembourg, 23 Frankfurt, 27 Munich, 29 Paris.

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Public Consultation and Community Involvement in Planning A twenty-first century guide Penny Norton Consult Online and Martin Hughes 1PMJUZ

July 2017: 234x156: 410pp 45 illustrations Hb: 978-1-138-68014-2 | Â£95.00 Pb: 978-1-138-68015-9 | Â£34.99 eBook: 978-1-315-56366-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS: List of figures; Foreword; Preface ; Acknowledgements ; Chapter 1 Introduction; Part One: the context of consultation today Chapter 2 A Brief History of Community Engagement in Planning ; Chapter 3 The Political Climate for Community Engagement Today; Chapter 4 Societal Change and Consultation; Chapter 5 The Impact of the Internet on Consultation; Part Two: the planning process Chapter 6 The Planning Process and the Role of Consultation; Chapter 7 The Formulation of a Local Plan; Chapter 8 Neighbourhood Planning; Chapter 9 Localism and New Community Rights; Chapter 10 The Process of a Planning Application ; Chapter 11 The role of local authorities in considering and determining planning applications; Chapter 12 Appeals and Public Inquiries ; Chapter 13 Consulting on a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP); Part Three: communications strategy and tactics Chapter 14 Strategy Development; Chapter 15 Tactics to Inform and Engage; Chapter 16 New Consultation Tactics ; Chapter 17 Analysis, Evaluation and Feedback; Chapter 18 Reducing Risk in Consultation; Part Four: post planning Chapter 19 Community Relations During Construction ; Chapter 20 Community Involvement Following Construction ; Chapter 21 Conclusion ; Appendix 1 Timeline of political events impacting on consultation ; Appendix 2 Examples of material and non material planning considerations; Appendix 3 Community involvement strategy outline; Appendix 4 Sample Content for Consultation Websites User Guides; Glossary ; Further reading; Index;

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¡ PILLO! mittees,” said Sir Terry, “instead having decisions on planning applications made through the equivalent of game simulators where you can press a button to decide yes or no. I also think that 10 years from now, automated vehicles will be affecting city making in a huge way as they will require far fewer car parking places, lanes for traffic and so on.” Sir Terry called the 21st century “the century of city making”, suggesting that planning would benefit from the wider pool of people becoming involved in decision-making. “These are extraordinarily exciting times for any involvement in city planning and I think town planning is at the core of that”, he said. Interviewed by Property Week, Sir Terry said: "What the GoldMedal represents to me, and I think to others, is a return after 40 to 50 years to the proactive, physical side of property. Around the late 1970s, and retreated into only a part of its potential, which was more to do with development control and reacting to other peoples ideas. In the minds of most people, that is what planning has become.… As an architect, planner and other designer, I think it's a return to physical and creative planning and I think I've done that in so many different ways."

A bumbling planning system

...and this is just the West End! Informative graphic from Property Week. A similar story applies to the City

Planning responsible for land-banking Gavin Barwell, when minister responsible for planning and housing, was quoted as saying that the key to getting homes built faster was to reduce land banking. He said: "The main way that we can reduce land banking is actually speeding up the planning system so that firms don't have to have such a queue in the pipeline.”

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IT set to transform planning Sir Terry Farrell CBE called on the planning profession to embrace the opportunities presented by the continuing technology revolution at a ceremony at which he became only the 15th person in more than a century to be awarded the RTPI’s Gold Medal. He said emerging technologies were set to ‘transform’ the planning profession: “We may get to the point where we don’t have planning com-

The industrial and logistics sector is being held back by a bumbling planning system that is struggling to keep up with the rapidly rapidly evolving market, according to new research by consultants Turley. In their recent Industrial Revolution report they conclude: "Inadequate planning has resulted in severe supply shortages in key markets and occupiers being forced to settle for sub-optimal facilities in ill-suited locations." Richard Lamming, head of economics at Turley, said: "The planning system isn't keeping pace with occupier demand." The situation has led to acute shortages of land in key areas of the country including Greater London, where logistics operators are finding it impossible to source optimal sites, the report concludes. n

Issue 103 October-December 2017

BRIEFING | LONDON PLANNING & DEVELOPMENT FORUM

Mayor's Transport Strategy & a new Design Companion Minutes of the meeting on Monday 25th September at UCL in the Peter Hall Room. Our host was Michael Edwards. Full minute by Drummond Robson at planninginlondon.com, LP&DF

The Chairman welcomed Mike Keegan, Policy Manager from TfL in the City Planning Department to introduce the first Discussion Topic, on the Draft Mayor's Transport Strategy 2017 (now published and for which the Consultation closed on 2 Oct 2017). He said the challenge was to decide which bits of the plan would sharpen growth and ensure sustainable development. To date there have been some 5,000 responses and some stakeholder responses.

Meeting on Monday 25th September at UCL in the Peter Hall Room. Our host was Michael Edwards. ATTENDANCE: Brian Waters (Chairman) Dom Barton: Metropolitan Infrastructure Duncan Bowie: UCL Esther Kurland: Urban Design London Jenny McCarthur:UCL Jonathan Manns: Colliers International Judith Ryser:Isocarp/Ugb/Cityscope Europe

Planning in London

Discussion Topics: 1. Draft Mayor's Transport Strategy 2017 MK said that this will be the third Mayor’s Transport Strategy. The first two (starting with Ken Livingstone in 2001) introduced Congestion Charging and Transformation of the bus network (increasing it by 30 per cent)and Established TfL’s multi modal role for transport in the capital as well as putting Crossrail on the map and in the second Enabled removal of the Western extension, increasing cycling, smoothing traffic while being modally agnostic Less prescriptive. Key future challenges include putting people at the centre of things - notably streets while challenging cars, public transport and the quality of life and future growth, especially encouragement to healthy streets and clean air: He illustrated ways of increasing the quality of public spaces for example in already busy areas by increasing pedestrian space. A key conclusion is that, with the actions identified in this strategy, a sustainable mode share of 80

Mike Keegan:TfL Michael Bach: London Forum Michael Coupe: London Society and Coupe Planning Michael Edwards: UCL Owen Woodwards: Be Ron Heath: RIBA Drummond Robson: Honorary Secretary and Robson Planning Apologies were received from: Alastair Gaskin, Andy Rogers, Brian Whiteley, David Bradley, Jessica Ferm, Peter Eversden, Riëtte Oosthuizen, Tim Wacher and Tom Ball

per cent can be achieved, meaning that eight in ten journeys made in London will be made on foot, by bicycle or by public transport and just two in ten by car, taxi, private hire vehicle or motorcycle However London is expected to grow to 10.5 million by 2041 and has already increased by half a million in the last 5-6 years. This was seized on by a member of the audience concerned that there was nothing in the plan about containment and the context of the wider south east, a theme returned to later. The matrix shows London with some 60 per cent of current trips being “sustainable” – in transport terms - compared with 80 per cent at the end of the plan period in 2041. [Whether the definition of sustainable here is the same used by Boroughs for development schemes as it should be is not clear]. New homes and jobs were described as the principles of good growth: Good access to public transport, High density, mixed use developments , People choose to walk and cycle, Car-free and car-lite places, Inclusive, accessible design, Carbon-free trav-

el and efficient freight. MK referred to an illustration of a future central London, with narrowed carriageway, zero emission buses, cargo bikes, electric delivery vehicles and an accessible station with high capacity, frequent services. This premise was challenged by DR who thought that growth would sometimes be good but often not and it would be a major problem separating out the two – greater congestion and poorer environmental quality would be natural outcomes of not considering London’s growth outside its present confines in the wider south east, whether the home counties wanted it or not. A support document image not included in the presentation shows >>>

Towards the Mayor’s Transport Strategy London Forum held two Open Meetings to discuss this important strategy. On 29 March Lucinda Turner of Transport for London outlined the key aims and principles, and Jeremy Leach of Living Streets set out what they would like to see in the strategy. Peter Pickering reports. Jeremy Leach noted that the Mayor’s transport Strategy will be only the third such strategy since the Greater London Authority was created. Living Streets’ manifesto for walking in London, concerned with both the mode of travel and also with the quality of places, had been accepted by the Mayoral candidates of all the main parties. He expected Healthy Streets to be a central concept in the Mayor’s Strategy: this concept includes places to shelter from the weather, shade, seats, control of noise levels, a zero target for deaths and serious injuries, and interesting things to see and do. Although Mini-Hollands had brought benefits to whole areas, and in Walthamstow overall traffic had been reduced by 16%, the wider objective ought to be creating Liveable Neighbourhoods. In 1971 many children under 10 were allowed to go on their own to any place within walking distance, but now almost none can. Although walking and cycling are crucial it is also vital to integrate them with public transport; improving public transport may need to be a first step. Living Streets would like to see road pricing and the Ultra Low Emission Zone extend to the whole of London. New York, Paris and Madrid seem to be ahead of London in dealing with diesel emissions and traffic more generally. A consultation is expected soon on what is now being described as the ‘transformation’ rather than the ‘pedestrianisation’ of Oxford Street. But there are also many other opportunities, such as the Strand, Soho, Parliament Square and the Mayfair squares. Action on these would be important to encouraging walking in the 21st Century Global City. Key principles of Transport Strategy Lucinda Turner apologised for not being able to provide a preview of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy; some aspects were still under discussion. She would outline the key principles and the direction of travel. TfL’s Business Plan is for a 5-year period and covers only TfL’s responsibilities, and all its content has to be fully funded. The Mayor’s Transport Strategy has a longer timescale and a wider perspective, including the policies and proposals of bodies other than TfL; policy on fares is dealt with separately. The first Strategy was quite specific, but inevitably in some respects overtaken by events. The second Strategy was more flexible but at the cost of being vaguer. Including specific projects in the Strategy provides a firmer legal basis for further work on them, even if their funding is not yet in place. Account should also be taken of the possibility that central government may devolve further functions to the Mayor. The three broad aims of the Strategy will be to create Healthy Streets, improve fpublic transport and provide for the projected increases in population and employment. There will be greater emphasis on integrating transport provision and land use. The planning rules on the amount of car parking and cycle storage will be reviewed. PTAL will be retained as a well understood tool even if it is not perfect. Healthy Streets Healthy Streets must be embedded in the planning system. Some improvements, for example landscaping, can be made at low cost. The appointment of the Walking and Cycling Commissioner has given walking a higher profile. With the increase in home deliveries sustainable freight systems will be

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important, but have not proved easy to establish. Air quality will be improved: NOx levels will be reduced by 40% in the Ultra Low Emission Zone proposed by the Mayor. The Mayor is lobbying central government to introduce a diesel scrappage scheme, and is of course committed to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050. Improving public transport The great challenges in improving public transport include maintaining the reliability of bus services. We are approaching Peak Tube: passenger movements into, out of and between trains will become the constraint, rather than the capacity of trains. The first stage in extending the Bakerloo Line will be identified as a priority and the Mayor still wants to reorganise the South London suburban lines into a Metro system. Bus transit schemes may be proposed in some areas. Population and employment There has been an 11% shift away from car use since 2000: that trend is expected to continue and the aim will be to achieve an even larger shift. But the projected increases in London’s population and employment are estimated to result in an extra 6 million trips a day. Greater density of development should help in achieving sustainable transport. Potential growth areas often do not have good transport connections at present. DfT’s assessment methodology gives emphasis to the benefits of time savings on existing transport corridors and does not give equal weight to meeting latent demand. The Strategy will have to establish a framework for use of new technology. Electric vehicles do not produce emissions on the road but still take up road space. With the aid of the internet car sharing and demand-responsive systems could be a major factor in Outer London. However, it is difficult to persuade car clubs to devote effort to Outer London because they foresee larger profits in Central London; and borough councils may raise objections to allocating road space for private profit. Borough Local Implementation Plans (LIPs) have led to big achievements and £1 billion will be allocated to them over the next five years. There will be firmer guidance about how the money should be used, with the emphasis on traffic reduction strategies. Publication of the draft of the Mayor’s Strategy may be accompanied by the draft guidance to boroughs on LIPs. The consultation period will be 12 weeks. Discussion from the floor Following the presentations there was a lively discussion with the two speakers. Peter Eversden asked how much influence Living Streets has. Jeremy Leach said there have been some achievements but the positon varies between boroughs and is affected by the resources a borough has available. Living Streets is not anti-car, and accepts that some people need to use a car but it is against disproportionate emphasis on it (Dick Allard emphasised the importance of cars to people of limited mobility). A representative of the Sydenham Society doubted the wisdom of promoting walking in Outer London given the bad state of footways and reduction in Summer 2017 street lighting. Chris Barker (Campaign for Better Transport) said the gaping hole in integration is mainline rail. Representatives of the Highgate Society complained that schemes for major intersections tend to give creation of town centres priority over integrating transport modes; bus stops had been scattered at Archway, with not enough attention paid to the needs of disabled people. Jeremy Leach said things had been managed more successfully on the Walworth Road. John Cox (Campaign for Better Transport) said too little attention has been paid to placemaking in proposals for the Bakerloo Line at Lewisham, although the con- >>>

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BRIEFING | LONDON PLANNING & DEVELOPMENT FORUM

>>> sultation on it is still in progress. He said that the new Brent Cross scheme would generate increased car traffic. Attention was drawn to the potential conflicts between pedestrians and cyclists; other speakers emphasised the need for a co-operative approach by the two groups in order to maximise the number of people campaigning for change. A speaker from the Chiswick Society drew attention to the convenience of combining cycling and walking. Representatives of the Marylebone Association highlighted the need to calculate displacement effects when traffic schemes are being planned. All the Central London amenity societies think there is no way of pedestrianising Oxford Street which will not damage air quality in nearby streets. Healthy Streets Board TfL has set up a Healthy Streets Board with the aim of balancing all the various factors involved. It may sometimes be possible to take mitigating measures outside the area covered by a scheme. Some people criticised excessive reliance on traffic modelling. Andrew Bosi said predictions of increased congestion or pollution are not always borne out in the event. Some complained about the impact of satnavs, which depending on the traffic conditions may well direct vehicles down streets which planners had assumed would be lightly used but did not want to close off. Michael Bach said developments at high densities must be accompanied by provision of social infrastructure and sites should be planned for that. Where developers provide contributions through section 106 agreements or Community Infrastructure Levy the need for transport improvements has to be weighed against other needs. Closing remarks Lucinda Turner said reducing the volume of traffic must be part of a solution. There are significant numbers of car journeys in Outer London which could be switched to other modes. Differences in trends in car use in different parts of London are explicable in terms of drivers’ motivations. Don’t underestimate the political opposition to proposals to limit vehicle use or increase its cost. The high-level commitments made by other world cities can be misleading because they tend to be subject to lots of exceptions. Making tube stations collection points for goods ordered on the internet will contribute to a sustainable freight system. TfL is requiring contractors to agree logistics plan at major sites. But the market is not bringing about consolidation of loads. Peter Eversden pointed to the advantages of transporting freight by water, including canals. The Mayor’s draft Transport Strategy was published on June 21 and was presented at London Forum’s Open Meeting by Lucy Saunders, Consultant in Public Health - Specialist in Transport & Urban Realm, and Mike Keegan, Policy Manager, Transport for London. Michael Bach introduced the speakers with some historical background. He explained that following the abolition of the Greater London Council (noteworthy for the ‘Fares fair’ policy) the central Government’s Department of Transport, as responsible for transport in London, had sought to build more roads but Ministers had eventually realised that such a policy was unacceptable to the people of London. The first Mayor after the formation of the Greater London Authority, Ken Livingstone, had introduced the Congestion Charge and increased bus usage. His successor, Boris Johnson, had retained the congestion charge (though removing the extension of its area) and had strongly encouraged cycling. TfL had taken over some of the heavy rail routes in London (the ‘Overground’ etc) and much increased their usage. Sadiq Khan was now consulting on a new transport strategy, emphasising air quality and health, not just traffic. Healthy Streets - the overarching framework Ms Saunders said that in Sadiq Khan’s new draft transport strategy air qual-

Planning in London

ity and health, not just traffic, were emphasised: ‘Healthy Streets’ was its overarching framework Londoners’ health was was strongly influenced by transport. Car ownership was the biggest cause of inactivity. Changing the look and feel of streets would encourage healthy activity, and reduce air pollution. London must be made walkable. Mr Keegan said that the draft Transport Strategy was putting people at its heart. The aim should be twenty minutes of active travel a day. The forecast of population growth, and road building not being an option, meant that there would have to be much greater use of public transport, cycling and walking. In central London there would have to be pressure on the most inefficient uses of space: demand management was the key - since the congestion charge was introduced travel on Saturdays and Sundays had greatly increased, as had the number of taxis and private hire vehicles (exempt from the congestion charge); policy on taxis and private hire vehicles would be kept under review, with some numerical limit on the latter not being ruled out. In inner London the increase by five times in the use of the Overground since TfL became responsible showed what could be achieved; buses could be redeployed, and bus speeds could be increased. In outer London car dependency would have to be reduced, cycling made safer, and air quality and the environment generally improved; it was important that an attack on diesel cars did not lead to a switch back to petrol; there should be low and zero emission zones. Individual boroughs should have local traffic reduction strategies. The draft Strategy strongly favoured devolving more of the rail services in London to the Mayor. That would support new homes and new jobs in London. As autonomous and connected road vehicles made their appearance in London they would have to be consistent with the strategy.

Question and answer session. There followed a lively question and answer session. Richard Bourn (Campaign for Better Transport) was surprised that the draft strategy still favoured the Silvertown Tunnel, which seemed entirely contrary to its philosophy. Mr Keegan said that the present nineteenth-century Blackwall Tunnel did not meet modern safety standards. It had to be replaced; charging for use of the replacement and for the Silvertown Tunnel would keep travel down consistently with the strategy. Ruth Mayorcas queried whether anything in the strategy would succeed in deterring car use; improvement in cycleways and strengthening of the congestion charge was required. Mr Keegan pointed out that the draft strategy was out for consultation; points like these should be made in response to that consultation. Charles King (East Surrey Transport Committee) said that the strategy, though right in principle, was not practical in areas like his, with hills that were difficult for pedestrians and cyclists; car use there was increasing. Wandsworth Living Streets thought target dates in the draft strategy were too distant, and should be brought forward; and wondered if it would be possible to get boroughs to act. Mr Keegan replied that there were interim target dates, and pointed out that local implementation plans had to be approved by the Mayor.. Tom Ball sought more emphasis on, and action to curb, the common bad behaviour by cyclists. Mr Keegan said that improving the design of facilities for cyclists would have a good impact on their behaviour. Peter Pickering claimed that the draft strategy failed to mention the economic and financial impacts of its proposals. Mr Keegan drew attention to the discussion beginning on page 265 of the funding of the capital proposals (some £3.3bn a year); other funding mechanisms were being examined including the devolution of Vehicle Excise Duty to the GLA. Current costs (like that for freezing fares)

>>> pictures we all recognise increasingly. Mike continued his presentation with images of recent and proposed new projects beginning with the Elizabeth Line (Crossrail) and following it with what were described as transport driven developments at Canary Wharf (DLR and Jubilee Line). [The City of London, The Reichmann brothers and Olympia and York (the developers) would have different perspectives on what drove these schemes]. The Transformation of Barking Riverside, with 11,000 new homes supported by an extension to London’s Overground. The Old Kent Road growth will be associated with the Bakerloo Line extension and expansions of The Overground into Outer London adding 50,000 more homes a year or many more jobs as an alternative generator of funds. Bus transit schemes and demand responsive transport schemes can support new jobs and homes with fixed infrastructure including guided buses. By 2041 modal share indicators predicted are 90 per cent of central London and 75 per cent outer London will not be car based in some 5.5 million journeys a day on an upgraded Underground. MK referred also to “Travel in London”, an annual statistical compendium of data from TfL/GLA Mike Keegan ended his presentation with the key question not yet resolved which is how to fund this strategy. Crossrail 2 is half government funded. Old Kent Road and the Bakerloo Line extension will generate many new jobs. Waterways offer growth in freight movement. Where there is no central government subsidy land value capture will provide an alternative funding source. Brian Waters, Chairman thanked MK for his worthwhile talk and extended the discussion which

had taken place to interplay with the presentation. A key concern expressed by Duncan Bowie who queried whether there was the transport capacity to meet London’s population growth, and where the evidence was for this. He too was concerned that the strategy was not looking outside London. The draft Mayor’s Transport Strategy evidence base is available at https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/ policy/9b28c200/ n

were the subject of the separate TfL business plan, and were being met by efficiency savings in TfL, including the profitable use of transport land. Steve Christof of Warren Street said that densification of his estate meant the loss of gardens where children played. Ms Saunders agreed that the healthy strategy should cover everything and take account of matters like that (which were outside her personal responsibility) Dick Allard said that any road user charge should be distance-based. Mr Keegan said that page 82 recognised this. Chris Barker (CBT London) advocated trams rather than buses on suitable routes - they were more successful in attracting people from cars. Alex Jenkins (Tower Hamlets branch of the London Cycling Campaign) asked about discussions with cyclists. Mr Bach said that demographic change was resulting in more cycling. Ms Saunders emphasised the inclusivity of the whole strategy. Diane Burridge sought better enforcement of the rule requiring cars to remain stationary until the lights changed. She also asked for public toilets to be more available; they were necessary for truly healthy streets. Gail Waldman (Highgate Society) emphasised the importance of Crossrail2 if the necessary housing was to be built in London. Mr Keegan said that the Mayor was giving 100% backing to having Crossrail2 by 2033. Roger Blake (Railfuture) said that TfL must keep on with its policies, know-

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The London Forum Open Meeting Discussion is reproduced in the box and reflects an earlier stage of consideration of the same topic.

>>>

SEE: Diagrams from the draft strategy overleaf

ing that even if borough councils supported things like parking restraint local residents might not; charging for parking on red routes was a possibility. Mr Keegan drew attention to the Implementation Plan at the end of the document. The GLA/TfL had to concentrate on its own road network, but must work with the boroughs. Bill Linskey suggested a single highways authority for London, but Mr Keegan had his doubts. Mr Egan (Highbury Community Association) said that requiring children to go to the nearest school would greatly reduce car use. Other questions raised concerned Heathrow and whether there was a healthy airports strategy; Mr Keegan drew attention to pages 248-9 of the draft strategy. The Mayor was opposed to Heathrow expansion unless very stringent conditions could be met; there would in any case have to be better public transport links. Other points made: buying up and removing parking spaces throughout London to deter car use; there were now specially adapted cycles which could be used by people with serious walking disabilities; more people in central London no longer had cars and if they moved outwards they might be less likely to acquire one. Mr Keegan observed that fewer people were taking driving tests. The NHS should be championing healthy streets; what mechanisms were there for improving the quality of road schemes; Ms Saunders said that, ironically, some schemes to encourage cycling were opposed by NHS London. n

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BRIEFING | LONDON PLANNING & DEVELOPMENT FORUM

Planning in London

>>>

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Discussion item 2 Esther Kurland of Urban Design London. UDL’s activities and their new book: The Design Companion for Planning and Placemaking by TfL and UDL The Chairman introduced Esther Kurland who has has been Director of UDL since 2006. Since that time she has worked to develop and improve UDL’s programme, working closely with core partners TfL, the GLA, London boroughs and many others to support and encourage good design in the capital. The Design Companion for Planning and Placemaking, issued in May 2017 is an essential primer to help those involved in the planning and placemaking process secure higher standards of urban design and the delivery of better places. This book expands on the design policies found in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and Planning Practice Guidance (PPG) and provides up to date explanations, examples, top tips and practical advice to help the reader understand and apply national policies and guidance. The book is structured in an easy to use fashion, with general principles and concepts described in Part 1, and Part 2 explaining how these can be applied to particular development types, such as housing, public space or tall buildings. This book has been written by a team of experts. Together, the contributions combine knowledge and expertise to showcase an established, common and practical approach to delivering better urban spaces, not just in London but throughout the UK and abroad. The book will be invaluable for planners, councillors, highway engineers and anyone involved in planning, creating or changing places. EK asked how Design and Planning Fit Together a key question which the book seeks to answer, responding that they are indivisible in terms of planning legislation, policies and processes. She highlighted some well-designed spaces and places from the seating around St John’s Church Chipping Barnet to Birmingham City Library, from NPPF to movement networks and pedsheds. She gave examples of distinctiveness, historic High Streets and the effects of different densities, materials and patterns. There were examples of Planning as a creative process based on different design schemes and the planning process, as well as the contribution to amassing cultural and community activities using graphics. There followed examples of design specifics related to different land uses and buildings contributing to urban spaces, be the buildings infill, basements or ingenious solutions to tight spaces. The theme of “Built for Life” is next – a series of assessments to evaluate whether the scheme is well integrated, characterful and with public and

Planning in London

sive guide to the complexities of planning…it is an essential companion for all those involved in the environment game – designers, developers, politicians as well as local communities”.

SEE: Books for a pre-view

private space well integrated. Often the perceived qualities are incidental to why they were put there. A bar and bollards to restrict vehicular access is seen as a structural feature enhancing identity and interest. Wind, street pollution, sunlight and daylight, scale and dimensions, uses of street space and so on together with other recognised standards are critically interpreted rather than used and calculated or tested in their sites and contexts. For example Eagle House is shown to illustrate different elements of scale of the building appreciated in near, middle and further distance views, rather than the building in City Road as a whole – as photographed. Perhaps the wider purpose is simply to increase design awareness and ensure that government advice and guidance (NPPF, Planning Practice Guidance etc.) is included for technical appraisers and for Council officers to interpret. Peter Murray, Chairman of New London Architecture says of it: “a marvellously comprehen-

Discussion Wider discussion included from Judith Ryser that she thought the document was axiomatic one liners. She asked who designs, who manages? Another comment stressed that it was not to design which requires different skills. EK was asked wo the document was for. She thought it was aimed in particular at Junior Planners. She said however that the new Minister of State for Housing and Planning, Alok Sharma, – an accountant - was not interested and that she did not intend to edit another edition. She said that “By Design” set the principles The Chairman thanked EK for her presentation and Michael Edwards and Jessica Ferm for hosting the event. n

NEXT MEETING on Monday 11TH DECEMBER at HTA Design, 78 Chamber Street London E1 8BL Our host: Riette Oosterhuizen Topics to be announced: check www.planninginlondon.com - LP&DF Forum meetings are open but please notify the Hon Secretary at robplan@btconnect.com

BROWNFIELD REGISTERS AND PPIP | DOMINICK VEASEY

Brownfield Registers and Permission in Principle Are these the keys to unlocking Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s land? asks Dominick Veasey

Dominick Veasey is associate director at Nexus Planning

In April 2017 the brownfield land register and permission in principle legislation came into force. With the goal of unlocking previously unavailable brownfield land, the new legislation will make brownfield registers and permission in principle obligatory for all local planning authorities. As a result, local councils throughout the country will need to publish their registers by 31 December 2017. As part of the changes, brownfield registers will consist of two parts. Part 1 makes it compulsory for local councils to evaluate brownfield sites that are at least 0.25ha or is able to accommodate at least five homes. If following public consultation, local councils decide to allocate the land for residential development, the Part 1 land will subsequently be included within the Part 2 register. Amongst other things, Part 2 requires that local councils state the planning status of the land. This includes a description of any proposed housing development and the minimum and maximum number of dwellings the land can support. Once land is included within Part 2, permission in principal has been established. All that is theoretically required is for

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developers or landowners to discharge any prescribed technical consent details. Local councils have the discretion to specify within Part 2 what additional information and detail is required at the technical consent stage; a process not dissimilar to discharging reserved matters attached to any outline planning permission. Through these measures, the Government intends to both accelerate housebuilding and safeguard greenfield land, including the green belt. Whilst these aims are admirable, the outlook in practice is less optimistic. In preparing the register, local councils are required to consider the development plan, national policy and other material considerations. An area of conflict and a potential barrier to sites coming forward will be where there is any uncertainty associated with development plan conflict or policy interpretation. One can only speculate, but if developers and landowners wish to discuss the prospects of their land progressing to the Stage 2 register, local councils may deviate to the formal pre-application process, requiring the submission of sometimes costly information upfront. Frustratingly for some, there no right to appeal if >>>

Issue 103 October-December 2017

BROWNFIELD REGISTERS AND PPIP | DOMINICK VEASEY

>>> the council decides not to allocate the land for residential development within the Part 2 register. Launched almost twenty years ago, the ‘brownfield first’ policy was first introduced by the ‘Planning for Communities of the Future’ white paper. In order to provide momentum to the policy, it was reinforced in the Planning Policy Statement 6 (PPS6), which asked local authorities to prioritise brownfield sites and ‘take stronger action’ to redevelop such land. Within the six years covered by PPS6 prior to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), official statistics demonstrate that on average only 62% of the homes built were developed on brownfield land. It is important to note that the prioritisation of brownfield land for residential development is also a key principle within the NPPF, introduced in 2012. Furthermore, the Housing White Paper, published in February 2017, states that the Government intends to amend the NPPF to indicate that ‘great weight’ should be attached to the value of using suitable brownfield land within settlements for homes. Indeed, national policy has long focused on brownfield land. As a review of councils’ five-year land supply trajectories show, the majority of brownfield sites, where councils have no policy concerns, are already included. Furthermore, trajectories also usually include an allowance for unidentified small-scale brownfield windfall sites and increasingly an allowance for office to residential conversions.

Planning in London

As a result, the industry will need to question the extent to which the new registers will identify and bring forward any meaningful additional brownfield land for housing. Additionally, with a supportive national brownfield policy and many local plans containing similar locally based policies, it is unclear how the registers will provide any greater redevelopment certainty for landowners and developers. The potential for brownfield registers to unlock additional land within London is even more uncertain. The London Plan already seeks at least 96% of new residential development to be on previously developed land. Monitoring data from the GLA confirms that over the past decade, the London authorities have collectively achieved an annual average of 97.6%. There appears to be minimal scope for improvement. Furthermore, in 2015 the Chancellor and the Mayor of London established the London Land Commission with the objective of identifying land in public ownership and help coordinate and accelerate the release of land for homes. At the time, the commitment was to ensure that all the capital’s brownfield sites were developed by 2025. It can be argued that London is already leaving no stone unturned in trying to meet its housing needs on brownfield sites. Indeed, against the London-wide housing requirement of 49,000 homes per annum, which was acknowledged to be too low, the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) rigorous assessment of potential housing capacity can only currently identify land for 42,000 new homes each year. This was discovered before the Government’s revised housing assessment methodology consultation document was published, suggesting that London needs 73,000 new homes a year. Within individual Borough’s the Government’s revised methodology suggests staggering increases in the level of housing currently planned for within Local Plans. This itself will create additional challenges of delivery. As reaffirmed by these new measures, maximising the potential of brownfield land is a key component to solving the housing crisis. However, even if coupled with maximising density and building tall, this should not be seen as the silver bullet for boosting housing supply; particularly in the context of London. As numerous studies have shown, brownfield sites alone cannot provide the land supply necessary. Both greenfield land and Green Belt land must be also considered. Despite being the focus of this latest legislative initiative, it is clear that uncertainty over the principle of residential development is not the primary obstacle for most brownfield site developments. In fact, matters such as land remediation costs, complicated multiple land ownerships, conflicting neighbouring land uses and difficult design issues continue to be the core issues causing delays for housing development on brownfield land. Although permission in principle and brownfield registers

are certainly useful, they will be unable to resolve these fundamental problems. Whilst there is no doubt that these registers will increase potential housing development in theory, it seems that the only true beneficiary will be the Government, who will be able to prove that they have met their pledge to get planning permission in some form for 90% of suitable brownfield sites before the next election. On the ground however, results may prove to be less positive, particularly in meeting Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s acute housing need. In the buildup to the permission in principle legislation being implemented, the Government stated that emerging local plans and neighbourhood plans would have the ability to apply permission in principle to emerging plan allocations. However, the legislation is notably and disappointingly absent of such provisions. Given the brownfield land register provisions, the emphasis on the permission in principle via emerging plan allocations would have been primarily focused on greenfield sites. With most greenfield land surrounding the capital being designated as

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Green Belt, any neighbourhood planning bodies within London would have been unable to apply the permission in principle mechanism and allocate meaningful greenfield site allocations. Furthermore, a persistent reluctance by national and local government to accept that a fundamental review of the Metropolitan Green Belt is necessary, after more than 50 years, also means that very few local plans within London would propose to allocate greenfield land and apply the permission in principle process; even if legislation was forthcoming. Whilst this is the case for London, the issue of emerging local and neighbourhood plans being unable to apply the permission in principle mechanism is considered to be a missed opportunity across the country. In the meantime, the industry will hope that the problem is addressed over the coming months, particularly as the Government implements its wider package of planning system reforms as outlined in the Housing White Paper. It continues to be a time of challenge and uncertainty although one constant remains - there is need and demand for significantly more new homes across England. n

Issue 103 October-December 2017

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SIR TERRY FARRELL

“My work these last 50 or so years has been heavily involved in creating a kinder, less doctrinaire world than that of the previous era of high modernism. It has been about layering, learning from the past and regenerating with communities’ involvement from the bottom up.”

Sir Terry Farrell CBE awarded the RTPI Gold Medal The award is in recognition of his outstanding achievements as one of the world’s most influential architects, planners and urban designers. The Royal Town Planning Institute Gold Medal is open to all classes of membership internationally and has only been awarded 14 times. Past recipients have included such luminaries as Sir Patrick Abercrombie, Lewis Mumford, Sir Colin Buchanan CBE and Sir Peter Hall. This award is in recognition of Sir Terry’s outstanding contribution towards developing thinking in urban design, his championing of urban planning and contribution to policy shaping at a national level, and his outstanding impact on place making through his professional career as an architect planner and urban designer. Stephen Wilkinson, RTPI President, said: “Sir Terry has a deep passion and understanding for places and people and has successfully demonstrated that in his work throughout his career. He is one of the few top practitioners who has truly embraced architecture, urban design and planning in a holistic vision and so vitally helped to advance integrated thinking among these disciplines. Through his belief in place and people he has been

instrumental in creating a culture where communities become more involved in the quality of their neighbourhoods. “The RTPI Gold Medal is the Institute’s greatest accolade. I am delighted that we are recognising his enormous contribution to place-making and the planning profession, and the way he has transformed some of our cities and made them better places.” Sir Terry has said: “I am very honoured by the recognition that this awards represents, particularly as it reflects the growing awareness that planning is a highly creative and pro-active endeavour that has the potential to transform places and communities. My work these last 50 or so years has been heavily involved in creating a kinder, less doctrinaire world than that of the previous era of high modernism. It has been about layering, learning from the past and regenerating with communities’ involvement from the bottom up. “The 21st century is the Century of global city making, which must be more sophisticated, joined up, sustainable and human centred going forward. Creative planning must lead future city making.”

Portrait by Richard Gleed

A Life in Planning Sir Terry Farrell These are exciting times to be a planner. City making is the biggest business of the 21st Century across the globe and urban planning has a critical role to play. There is a huge demand for the very particular skill sets required, and in particular for creative, collaborative and proactive planning led by visionary people who want to make things happen. In my view we are not yet rising to the challenge. As Nick Raynsford said at the launch of his review of housing and planning: "More than ever we need a planning system which com-

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mands the confidence of the public and delivers outcomes of which we can feel proud. After too many years of piecemeal changes and tinkering with the system, we need to go back to first principles and seek to develop a practical blueprint for the future of planning in England.” So why have we been defensive and reactive in recent times, at the expense of properly creative spatial and physical planning? Is this more to do with the way the public sector and arguably the RTPI sees themselves and the role they have to play? Being awarded the RTPI Gold Medal has made me stop

>>>

Issue 103 October-December 2017

SIR TERRY FARRELL

>>> and reflect on the state of our profession and the journey we have been on. If you rewind fifty years then creative planning was absolutely central with entire new towns being planned and built, the green belt being institutionalised, bombed towns like Hull, Plymouth and London being rebuilt and entire road systems laid out. Peter Hall said that Abercrombie was the last of the visionary architect planners, but that way of doing things was flawed and it was too top down. Like Robert Moses in New York decisions were made without consultation that had a massive impact on the generations to follow and the way we have lived our lives in urban areas. There was of course a reaction to this and other gold medallists wrote important books like City in History by Lewis Mumford and Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan and in New York Jane Jacobs was the antidote to this centralist and often destructive approach to urban planning which prioritised cars over people, zoning over mixed use and new build over retrofit. The reaction was acutely felt here in London when large swathes of Covent Garden were due to be demolished and that was the period when I became an urban activist and joined the voluntary sector in calling for a different way of doing things. The disaggregation of the public, private and voluntary sectors in the face of this complexity had the most enduring impact and is largely responsible for the state we are in today. They set themselves up in opposition to each other, as poacher and gamekeeper, with the Town and Country Planning Act

Planning in London

providing the rules of engagement. I have spent most of my life trying to bridge these enemy camps, to bring them together with a shared understanding of the best way forward rather than increasingly entrenched positions amplified by architects arguing for modernism or conservationists arguing for protection with equally evangelical arguments. The world we live in is a complex one and these binary arguments are not fit for purpose. We are facing huge challenges like population growth, climate change, food security and a crisis of affordability in our cities which need creative and collaborative planning and joint leadership from public, private and voluntary sectors. Mayors are proving to be effective leaders as cities become the drivers for change and local authorities are beginning to rise to the challenge and do more than just reactive, policyled planning. Some of the most rewarding projects I have worked on in my career were initiated by me voluntarily, like the masterplan for the Thames Estuary, vision for Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s airport connectivity and Old Oak Common as a major hub. I would encourage everyone involved in urban planning to get into the ideas business and become urban activists. City making is huge and the UK has an unparalleled reputation for post-industrial regeneration, so my clarion call for planners everywhere is to stick their heads above the parapet, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hide in comfort zones or fear the consequences of taking the initiative and promoting ways forward. Become leaders again like Abercrombie, Buchanan, Mumford and Hall!

SIR TERRY FARRELL | PROJECTS

LEFT: Brindley Place, Birmingham Brindley Place is about mending the city. It is a masterplan that seeks to undo the over-simplistic planning solutions of the 1950s and breathe new life and prosperity into a half-moribund section of the city. The site lies immediately next to Birmingham’s National Indoor Arena and International Conference Centre. It is central to the city’s strategic plan to expand the centre westwards and raise the city’s national and international profile. The 1991 Farrell masterplan gave Brindley Place a strong sense of character and historical continuity. The main principle behind Farrells work was the creation of a complete pedestrian network, articulated by a series of urban spaces on three axes that knitted into the city beyond. A new square provided a heart for the area; a high-level route linked to offices and shops; and a bridge connected to a leisure area. The canal edge was linked to the rest of the city by existing and proposed pedestrian bridges. The industrial relics of the area were integrated into the masterplan and three listed buildings were retained as focal points in the scheme.

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ABOVE: Newcastle Quayside, Newcastle The Quayside offers an identity and character – unique to Newcastle – created by a sequence of landscaped squares and urban spaces along the river. The development provides an exceptional office environment and an exciting retail, leisure and public focus for the new Quarter; the layout and detail of the scheme forges links to all surrounding developments and neighbourhoods. The Masterplan for Newcastle Quayside provides a framework of urban spaces, pedestrian activity, vehicular and service circulation, services and other civil engineering infrastructure, together with urban design guidelines for the development of individual buildings which have been built over a period of time to conform with this framework. The Masterplan provides clear and legible pedestrian links throughout the site as well as enhancing the route along the river’s edge. It also affords a permeable pedestrian network outside the site, thereby knitting itself in as an integral part of the city. At the centre of the scheme, a major landscaped civic square provides a heart to the new Quarter and links retail and parking elements to the pedestrian route along the river. This pedestrian route passes through the whole of the scheme, intersecting several secondary urban spaces. This project won the Civic Trust Urban Design Award and RTPI Spaces Award in 1998 and was recently awarded the 1999 British Urban Regeneration Award for Best Practice. >>>

Issue 103 October-December 2017

SIR TERRY FARRELL | PROJECTS

RIGHT & BELOW: Kowloon Station Development When Hong Kong resolved to close its congested airport at Kai Tak, the construction of its replacement broke all records for scale, speed, and innovation. Part of the largest infrastructure project in Hong Kong’s history, the Lantau Airport Railway was conceived to provide a high-speed link between the city and the new airport on the remote island of Chek Lap Kok. Farrells designed the largest stop on the line, Kowloon Station, which serves both the Tung Chung Line and the Airport Express. It resembles an airport terminal more than a conventional metro station, incorporating intown check-in counters, baggage handling and screening systems, as well as programmatically complex facilities for interchange to fran-

Planning in London

chised buses, minibuses, taxis, and private coaches. Above the station we developed a masterplan for a high-density, three-dimensional transit-oriented urban quarter. The seven development packages comprise one of the world’s largest station air rights developments, grossing over one million square metres of space for hotel, office, retail and residential accommodation arranged around a central square with easy access to the station below. The final development package is home to the 118-storey International Commerce Centre, Hong Kong’s tallest building. The Kowloon Station Development made provision for pedestrian links, at the first storey, with the unrealised Kowloon Point vision. It overlooks the West Kowloon Cultural District, home to the M+ Museum for Visual Culture and the Kowloon Ventilation Building.

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Issue 103 October-December 2017

SIR TERRY FARRELL | PROJECTS

Planning in London

LEFT: Thames Estuary Parklands Farrells have been involved with masterplanning the Thames Estuary Parklands for two decades, believing passionately in the potential East London and the Estuary have to accommodate London’s future growth. The Parklands vision: regenerate and develop urban and rural open spaces which are connected to create an accessible and coherent landscape. This will improve the quality of life for people who live in the Thames Gateway, and the experience for those who visit and work in it. Parklands spaces should be sustainable and contribute towards the development of the Gateway as an eco-region. The vision can be implemented over time by a variety of organisations at national, regional and local level. Parklands’ aim is to help make the Thames Gateway a special place that draws on the Thames Estuary’s unique landscape, its rich history and its vibrant mix of cultures and communities. A vision has been created that connects these communities – both existing and new – to the river, its tributaries and the Estuary landscape. Over the last 10 years, £70 million pounds has been spent on projects related to our Parklands vision and the work continues through Terry Farrell’s chairing of the Thames Gateway Local Nature Partnership and our membership of the Thames Estuary Partnership.

LEFT: Marylebone-Euston Road, London The Marylebone-Euston Road is a key east-west artery in London. It has the potential to be transformed into one of London’s greatest assets with street life, attractive landscaping, major squares and green spaces. Our studies have focused on major transport infrastructure, interchanges, pedestrian flows, commercial addresses, office precincts and landscape improvement. Much of its enormous potential stems from the close proximity of a number of mainline stations; it is a significant arrival/departure point for mainland travel as well as having direct access to Europe via the Eurostar at Kings Cross St Pancras. Our intellectual framework has acted as a catalyst for change. A pedestrian crossing has since been installed under the flyover at Edgware Road, beginning to transform this car-dominated area into a more pedestrian-friendly zone. At Euston Circus, our proposals to integrate pedestrians and traffic have been built out and have brought a huge improvement to the pedestrian movement across Euston Road. Similarly, our Regent’s Place masterplan transformed this part of London from a disconnected commercial enclave into a liveable and attractive part of the city; all demonstrating the benefit of taking as our starting point that the ‘place’ as the client.

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Issue 103 October-December 2017

SIR TERRY FARRELL | PROJECTS

Aerial Images by Andrew Holt, Sept 2017

Planning in London

Lots Road, London Located on Lots Road, London SW10, Chelsea Waterfront is a residential led mixed use development. It is the only major development site of its size on the north side of the river, west of Canary Wharf and includes the iconic Lots Road Power Station which is to be carefully refurbished. The scheme includes two towers of 37 and 25 storeys and low rise apartments situated on the riverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s edge surrounded by landscaped gardens which are

publicly accessible, opening up 400m of waterfront to the public. Farrells are providing full architectural services and interior design for this development, as well as the masterplan for the site. We are also designing the Entrance Pavilion, an elegant structure which forms an integrated part of the landscaped entrance to the Chelsea Waterfront development. It is an open and welcoming pavilion for visitors which also provides a soft security presence.

DISTRICT ENERGY | DOMINIC BARTON

Powering King’s Cross – a multi-utility approach Last issue Dominic Barton wrote about district energy networks. Here he explains how they are working at Argent’s King’s Cross development

The landmark 67-acre development at King’s Cross is one of the largest and most prestigious regeneration projects in the UK. King’s Cross is a vibrant mix of old and new. A rich industrial heritage and restored historic buildings sit alongside modern urban dwellings and contemporary offices. Eventually, there will be 2,000 new homes, of which a significant number will be affordable housing, alongside 3.4 million square feet of commercial property including Google’s Headquarters, underpinning the creation of over 30,000 jobs in high-value knowledge sectors. With circa 35,000 people expected to be housed, employed and entertained at King’s Cross, a major part of the project was providing the essential utilities required for next generation living. The solution delivered by Metropolitan included installing future-proofed district energy solutions and cutting-edge utilities. The challenge The development partnership wanted King’s Cross to become a flagship development not just in terms of its size but also its message for the future. They needed a community whose sustainable living would set an example for many years to come. The development partnership needed to show how it is possible, even within the demands of today’s society, to

reduce bills and eliminate waste of resource. King’s Cross was to be an exemplar of how low-carbon development could be achieved in London. While the developer required traditional utilities for some of their provision, they also needed more - they required futureproof solutions and flexibility, as well as having the desire to work with one company, in partnership. One partner to deliver it all For Argent (the developer working on behalf of the partnership), Metropolitan was the innovative, competitive and unique alternative to the traditional utility companies. Just one partner was needed to deliver the total energy and utility infrastructure for the entire development: electricity, district energy, fibre, water, wastewater and gas; all the way from the initial design to the upstream utility company network connections. Metropolitan offered the developer the expertise, flexibility and innovation required and became its long-term partner as owner and operator of the site networks. District Energy The first challenge at King’s Cross was to provide an alternative to the traditional gas network, with individual boilers in each home. The solution came in the form of district energy, a >>>

©iStock.com/stockinasia-598549380

RIGHT: Granary Square with Central St. Martin’s

Dominic Barton, Metropolitan Infrastructure Ltd

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Issue 103 October-December 2017

DISTRICT ENERGY | DOMINIC BARTON

>>>

RIGHT: Ultrafast end-to-end fibre technology BELOW: King's Cross under construction BELOW RIGHT: CHP (combined heat & power) engine at King’s Cross, and The control centre

network of pipes that efficiently distributes locally generated heat to the whole development. The use of one common plant, or energy centre, rather than individual boilers in each home or public/commercial building is far more energy-efficient as well as often more cost-effective. The homeowner or building manager is still able to control the heat input and each customer is individually metered for the energy used. When there is low demand for heat across the development, the heat can be kept in a thermal store. During periods of particularly high demand, the system can be ‘topped up’ with electricity from the grid, making it an extremely flexible solution. The flexibility does not end there. The district energy network at King’s Cross is scaleable and designed to evolve with the growing number of people living and working there. This means that there was no need for a full capacity energy centre from day one and an additional heating plant could be added to the energy centre as and when required. The Energy Centre at King’s Cross consists of 2 x 2MVA Combined Heat and Power engines (CHP), 3 x 10MW gas boilers and 2 x 75m2 thermal stores. The centre meets 99 per cent of the current development’s heat demand with a saving of 50 per cent in carbon emissions over traditional utility solutions. The King’s Cross scheme has delivered heating generation efficiencies in excess of those planned – achieving a CHP Quality Assurance Certificate with a QI score of 116.46, 10 points above the expected level. CHP Quality Assurance is a government initiative which monitors energy efficiency and environmental performance. Furthermore, the power generated by the CHP, if not used locally, is sold to the grid. As the site-wide electricity network is

operated on an open-access basis, residents can choose their electricity supplier in the normal way. The energy efficiency statistics speak for themselves: Carbon: 50 per cent saving in carbon emissions based on traditional utility solutions Electric: 80 per cent efficient compared to 30 per cent in the conventional UK electricity supply Heat: An energy centre meets almost 100 per cent of head demand and 80 per cent of the power demand. For a discussion of how district energy helps achieve London’s zero carbon requirements see my article in the last issue of Planning in London No.102, July/August 2017.

Embracing evolving technology Metropolitan and the developer are also committed to technological evolution and plan to install one of the UK’s first fuel cells to produce electricity and heat as an alternative to the standard CHP plant. The fuel cell converts gas into hydrogen and then carbon dioxide and water. It is a highly efficient electricity generator that is up to 90 per cent efficient and emits no particulate emissions. In a further development of the network, the Energy Centre will be used to provide district cooling as well as heating, with electricity from the CHP engines used to drive cooling plants. Energy Services Company (ESCo) A fully managed ESCo is part of the solution for the local delivery of de-centralised energy, and this includes providing professional metering and billing services to the householder. The ownership of the infrastructure at King’s Cross is a longterm partnership. The lead developer, Argent, has maintained a strong interest in the project, retaining a majority share in the ownership of the ESCo, where the CHP is based and the district heat network begins. The remaining share of the ESCo is owned by Metropolitan, continuing the long-term relationship. The ESCo owns the plant in the energy centre and Metropolitan own the heat and cooling networks, in addition to all of the utility networks on the site. This means that both Argent and Metropolitan will continue to have a great interest in the success of the development, managing the customers’ needs, long after the construction phases have been completed. Protection for consumers Residents and tenants at King’s Cross have experienced savings of over 5 per cent on fuel bills. In addition to fuel savings, residential consumers at King’s Cross are protected by the scheme’s membership of the Heat Trust, an industry-led, self-regulatory initiative which recognises best practice. Metropolitan was one of the first to register a

Planning in London

scheme (King’s Cross) with the Heat Trust and as a member commits to abide by the scheme rules which protect and safeguard the interests of all heat customers. Service standards cover the support of vulnerable heat customers; fault and emergency reporting; billing and payment arrangements; complaint handling; and privacy policy and data protection.

Multi-utility solution At King’s Cross, Metropolitan offered the major advantage of being able to deliver the total energy and utility infrastructure from initial design to the final connections. One project manager had the overview of the designs for all utilities – electricity, heat, water, fibre and gas. Metropolitan manages the connection to each of the upstream utility grids, enabling the whole project to be completed by just one company. This also keeps connection costs to a minimum for the developer, and provides a far more responsive service when compared with traditional utility providers. Metropolitan is also providing ultrafast end-to-end fibre technology to the development. Known as Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH), this solution brings fibre optic cables not just to the nearest street cabinet but right into every home in the development. While many providers are still installing and utilising copper cables for the ‘last mile’ of the network, FTTH ensures that the same ultrafast service is provided all the way to every home. Metropolitan’s end-to-end, fibre broadband gives King’s Cross future-proof technology. It delivers the fastest broadband speeds available anywhere in the UK and the best possible online experience, with a choice of five service providers. With unlimited capacity and infinite network potential, it will also continue to meet growing demand. n

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Issue 103 October-December 2017

WOOLWICH CREATIVE DISTRICT | RAB BENNETTS

Woolwich Creative District Woolwich Arsenal was a serious production facility from the late 17th century. Rab Bennetts tells the story of its re-emergence

Rab Bennetts is a director at Bennetts Associates, architects

Planning in London

There is evidence of Thames-side armaments manufacture and storage at Woolwich from Elizabethan times, but the establishment of Woolwich Arsenal as a serious production facility dates from the late 17th century. Production ebbed and flowed with the enmity between countries and empires at war and, by the early years of the 20th century, a ‘walled city’ supplying the army and navy covered 1300 acres and employed 100,000 people - enough for a top flight factory football team that moved to north London in 1913. First world war bombing raids revealed the vulnerability of such a large single site and ordnance manufacture was subsequently dispersed within the UK, but production of weapons and ammunition continued on the site until after the Korean war in the 1950s. It’s staggering to think that the UK’s first atomic bomb was developed within the densely populated fringes of London. Land disposals followed in the ‘50s and ‘60s to the east of Woolwich itself, the area that eventually became Thamesmead

new town. My first ‘proper’ job was in fact as a year-out student at the Greater London Council within the planning and infrastructure team at Thamesmead in 1974-5, creating a network of cycle-paths, canals and walkways out of the industrial landscape left behind from the moated ammunition stores, firing ranges and loading docks. Thamesmead itself is a fable of postwar planning, with a heroic modernist vision that was gradually undermined by declining political will at the GLC (and by the fallout from Clockwork Orange which was filmed there!), but much of the 1970s infrastructure remains. One item that failed to materialise, though, was the Thames Crossing, which I recall was shown on the 1970s plans as ‘to be completed by 1990’. London is still waiting for the Thames Crossing, but recent schemes to add new mixed-tenure developments to Thamesmead hold out the promise of a future with far greater vitality. Parts of the central area of Woolwich Arsenal remained in use for administrative functions, but many of the unique 18th

and 19th century production buildings were pulled down after production ceased, long before the heritage and cultural potential of large-scale redundant industrial sites became apparent. Much of the central area is now being redeveloped by Berkeley Homes, who are well-advanced with a scheme to provide 5,000 new homes, together with shops, restaurants and an expansive public realm. Berkeley’s timing is significant, as the regeneration area not only boasts a 1km riverfront and proximity to London City Airport but also a Crossrail station, which is due to open in 2018. The regenerative impact of such powerful transport links - hard won through political lobbying after the initial route did not include a station in Woolwich - could hardly be clearer. Berkeley have converted or extended some of the surviving buildings for apartments and cafes, but a distinguished group of five existing buildings has been retained for public uses between the Thames and the site’s imposing entrance gateway close to Woolwich town centre. In the last few years various proposals for these buildings have come and gone, partly due to economic conditions but also because of the sheer scale of the challenge. Now the Royal Borough of Greenwich has launched a visionary project to bring all five buildings back into use and place Woolwich at the forefront of arts and culture in London. As its name - the Woolwich Creative District - suggests, this is to be a cluster of energy and creativity, with resident performing arts companies mixed with visiting theatre groups, orchestras, dance companies and visual artists. The size and ambition of the scheme are socially and economically important for the immediate locality but are also hugely significant for London and beyond. Comparisons with the South

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Bank Centre, the new facilities at Battersea and ‘Olympicopolis’ are self-evident, but the European dimension invites cultural links to large-scale, mixed use arts facilities in Paris, Madrid, Nantes and Duisburg to name but a few. The common factor is the re-use of adaptable industrial buildings for innovative public installations and performances serving a wide range of communities, in surroundings that are a world away from more conventional ‘establishment’ venues. Two of the five buildings, all of which are listed, have a domestic scale that is suitable for studios, rehearsal or museum functions. The other three are far larger, with magnificent, multiple-bay production halls that could accommodate performances for 500-1000 people supported by ‘pop-up’ enclosures and support facilities. The essential character of heavy walls and light roofs, designed for the possibility of explosions, is something to exploit. Well-lit from above, with delightful steel trusses that defy gravity, the quality of the spaces invites intimate, colourful enclosures or epic open-plan performances. A public acoustic test with a full orchestra this September this year has already revealed exceptional acoustics in at least one of the unconverted buildings. Improvisation, so much a part of successful theatre, will be an obligation for performers and the design team alike. The team led by Bennetts Associates is to convert the building shells into viable venues, with incoming resident companies generally carrying out their ephemeral fit-out themselves. The timetable is brisk and the first performances are expected in 2019, just after Crossrail connects Woolwich Arsenal to a potential audience of millions. n SEE images next page >>>

Client: Royal Borough of Greenwich Architect and Lead Consultant : Bennetts Associates Conservation Architect: Consarc Engineers: Buro Happold Theatre Consultant: Sound Space Vision Acoustic Consultant: Gillieron Scott

Issue 103 October-December 2017

WOOLWICH CREATIVE DISTRICT | RAB BENNETTS

Planning in London

A LANDOWNERS LEGACY TO GARDEN VILLAGES | ROBBIE KERR

Delivering homes and places with character Councils, landowners – of estates or PLCs – can and should work together with communities to shape the way new housing is delivered says Robbie Kerr with reference to proposals for a new Garden Village at Welborne, Hampshire

IMAGE: :High level development principles for Welborne – Image: AECOM

Robbie Kerr is a director of Adam Architecture

The Secretary of State announced on 14th September new measures to ‘force councils to better measure the local requirement for housing’. The consultation document Planning for the right homes in the right places: consultation proposals, set out the government’s vision of how it might implement the recommendations in the Housing White Paper. The consultation document proposes making the housing allocations across local authorities more standardised and straightforward, encouraging councils to deliver more homes, and aim for a revised housing target of 266,000 homes a year. Not only is this an increase on a figure that is not being met, a recent Savills’ report suggested that applications were being focused in the wrong places. There was an annual shortfall of 86,000 homes in the least affordable and most in demand areas. In an effort to take a new and locally acceptable approach to development ADAM

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Architecture have been working with AECOM developing proposals for a new Garden Village at Welborne, Hampshire, with Buckland Development Ltd for 6,000 new homes, 30 per cent of which will be affordable. Only 41 per cent of councils have identified sufficient sites within Local Plans to meet their housing allocations. The report announced last week provides direction and incentives to get the authorities to address the concerns through a series of different mechanisms. The renewed focus does however raise the issues of the popularity of development and the often hostile resistance to any form of development. Public perception of new housing schemes is understandably low. The paucity of prepared council local plans has resulted in developments obtaining planning by appeal. The invaluable contribution local communities can and do make to schemes is lost and local identity missed. The Housing Minister recently assured >>>

Issue 103 October-December 2017

A LANDOWNERS LEGACY TO GARDEN VILLAGES | ROBBIE KERR

those at the RESI Conference that it was not the actual development that was unpopular it was the quality. Quality is perhaps easier to address than style or appearance but both should follow successfully if a less desperate rush for the quick returns is sought and a new approach to house building can be encouraged. In order to make better places and developments we must find a way of shifting the perception that houses are not just a commodity for improving the share price, that quality invested between buildings and engendering lasting identity will benefit PLC and individuals both on the developments and in their environs. Most planning applications for masterplans now claim they ‘place-make’ yet the nature of the shareholder returns, and short-term debt funding arrangements that many developers act under, means that all to often these end up as superficial dressing. The admirable attribute of place-making has been eroded by poor implementation yet there is a way to not only ‘place-make’ but leave a lasting legacy that landowners, locals and new owners can embrace. The Garden Village has gained traction under the government’s framework. The new 21st century incarnations tackle similar issues of space and quality of life even if the particular realities of Ebenezer Howard’s 19th century Britain is thankfully unrecognisable today. The Garden Village concept, if delivered in the right hands, can create settlements that promote an urban way of life in a rural setting, with walkable and vibrant

neighbourhoods, and where the land value is captured for the community. The promotion of environmental and economic responsibility integrates to encourage social inclusion. The government’s Garden Village Framework identified Welborne in the initial fourteen sites. Three additional sites have been announced and further funding to support these sites has been committed. Such political and economic stimulus provides the momentum that these substantial undertakABOVE: High level design principles for Welborne – Image: AECOM LEFT: :Illustrative comprehensive masterplan for Welborne – Image: AECOM RIGHT ABOVE: :Illustrative aerial perspective of Welborne – Image: AECOM

Planning in London

ings require in the face of multiple challenges encountered through the concept and subsequent planning process. In March 2017, Buckland Development Ltd, AECOM and ADAM Architecture, along with a substantial team of consultants submitted an outline application for 6,000 new homes on land largely owned by the Southwick Estate. This is one of the first Garden Villages to come forward and was the product of nine years of commitment and hard work driven by a client with long term vision. The results, planning dependent, offer an opportunity to see an exemplar project that will deliver a new settlement centred around a village centre and two local centres promoting walkability. These will filter through 270 acres of natural green space, play areas, allotments and sports facilities. Linking over a million sqft of work space, or 5,735 local jobs. It is not however as simple as just homes and work. Even in the outline proposals new facilities for the community are essential to the long-term success and acceptance of the scheme. While a new secondary school and three new primary schools are certainly helpful, the long-term quality of the new Village will lie in its management strategy, extensive details of which support the application. Estate Management Companies will be set up to ensure that the spaces between the buildings remain as vibrant as the community that forms within it. Realising that developments of this size will take a minimum of 20 years, and almost certainly longer, underlies the importance of getting it right at the start and putting the controls in place to retain the focus to the original concepts as each new

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phase comes forward. At Welborne a series of high level design development principles provide guidance on details that will secure the long-term quality of the urban and architectural realm without defining the style. Proper engagement with community that surrounds the site is as important. At Welborne, consultation and community dialogue was integrated throughout the development with lengthy sessions alongside residence associations, societies and Parish Councils. The balance and mix of tenure and type of housing needs the flexibility to meet the needs of current and future trends but the current housing shortage also needs affordable homes – Welborne promises to provide up to 30 per cent affordable houses of different tenures. Guiding design principles, design guides or codes provide a way of tying all these influences together, whilst leaving enough flexibility for developments to breath within the shifting patterns time dictates. The ability to take a long-term approach may seem a luxury yet there are huge upsides. ADAM Architecture have contributed to the Princes Foundation’s Building a legacy, a Landowner’s guide to popular development, a document that aims to set out the mechanisms and benefits a legacy approach. Many of the attributes that are set out as successes of this scheme are intertwined with the principles of this approach. Viewing development as a legacy fosters a sense of community, both in gaining support of existing surrounding residence and importantly with those that will come. Taking an approach to development that embraces many of the characteristics that make Garden Villages so desirable – the walkable, integrated,

REFERENCE: Emmett, S., Housing White Paper, Savills, 2 March 2017 https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/resi-conference-2017 © Robbie Kerr September 2017 IMAGES, CAPTIONS AND CREDITS: :Outline land framework plan – Image credit: AECOM :High level development principles for Welborne – Image credit: AECOM :High level design principles for Welborne – Image Credit: AECOM :Illustrative comprehensive masterplan for Welborne – Image Credit: AECOM :Illustrative aerial perspective of Welborne – Image Credit: AECOM :Illustrative layout of local centre of Welborne – Image Credit: ADAM Architecture :Illustrative aerial view of village centre at Welborne – Image Credit: ADAM Architecture :Illustrative layout of village centre at Welborne – Image Credit: ADAM Architecture

Issue 103 October-December 2017

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A LANDOWNERS LEGACY TO GARDEN VILLAGES | ROBBIE KERR

well designed, environmental, local identity – help establish principles that mean the built fabric is done well and unlocks the economic, natural and community capital benefiting more people now and for future generations. The economic benefits are not limited to landowner but the approach allows value to be nurtured throughout the life of the development, incentivising all parties from owners to builders and local communities to help make these places they are.

ABOVE: Illustrative layout of local centre of Welborne – Image ADAM Architecture RIGHT: :Illustrative aerial view of village centre at Welborne – Image: ADAM Architecture FAR RIGHT: Outline land framework plan – Image: AECOM

Planning in London

ADAM Architecture have been working closely with landed estates through to pension funds across the UK, in areas that cannot boast the land values of London and where the commercial margins are tighter. The approach promoted at Welborne and with a ‘Landowner Legacy’ view does just that and allows landowners to enjoy the increased returns through-

out the length of the project, sharing in the accumulated quality that is put in from the first meetings to the final sale. Garden villages are one way to deliver new housing and it has government support. If the overarching principles of a long term responsible view to developments and their subsequent management are seriously considered, it is certainly possible that

Alok Sharma’s statement that development is not unpopular might actually become a reality. Councils, landowners – of estates or PLCs – can and should work together with communities to shape the way new housing is delivered. The legacy approach may take time but the alternative is more standard commodity houses, unpopular development, resistance and a failure to provide the much-needed homes. n

Issue 102 July-September 2017

JOHN LEWIS | THAMESMEAD

Fulfilling the vision of Thamesmead If you get regeneration right, and you help to enhance a place for the people living and working there, great things can be achieved says John Lewis

John Lewis is executive director, Thamesmead at Peabody

Planning in London

The regeneration of place carries an enormous responsibility. The consequences of mistakes can be felt for generations to come. But if you get it right, and you help to enhance a place for the people living and working there, great things can be achieved. This was the promise of Thamesmead in the 1960s. A new town for London, created on what was previously marshland, to provide a good home for 60,000 people. It hasn’t yet fulfilled that potential, and for many complex reasons the vision of GLC master-planners did not come to fruition. Planning mistakes played their part, and lack of investment in transport and social infrastructure hampered the development of the town. In 2014, the major landholdings and assets in Thamesmead were acquired by Peabody, putting us in a unique position to facilitate transformational change. Housing, community and commercial facilities, and over 100 acres of vacant developable land are now owned by a single, well-resourced organisation for the first time in a generation. Our land holdings offer the potential to deliver 20,000 new homes in Thamesmead – a significant contribution to helping Londoners secure an affordable home. But if the history of Thamesmead has taught us anything, it is that successful regeneration is about much more than simply building new homes. The town is the same size as central London – it is home to 45,000 people and the homes are spread broadly across nine neighbourhoods. Development spans four decades, ranging from early modernist 1960s concrete homes in the South Thamesmead estate to more traditional suburban housing across north and west Thamesmead, built predominately in the 1980s and 1990s. The population density of persons per hectare in Thamesmead is 44, compared to the London average of 53.5 and the inner London figure of 101 people per hectare. Its rich landscape includes 75 hectares of greenways, pocket parks and other accessible green space, 7km of canals, five lakes, 5km of river frontage and 30,000 trees. It is a remarkable place. 50 years after the first homes were completed, our vision is that Thamesmead will finally realise its potential as London’s new town. To achieve it we are going to ensure that new homes are intelligently designed, and older homes well maintained. Neighbourhoods will be expertly managed, with extensive public realm assets, and shops and leisure facilities for the local community and visitors. The area will feel safe and secure, with good schools and things for young people to do. The area’s green spaces, waterways and lakes will be at the heart of everyday life – yet thanks to the coming transport improvements will be just 20 minutes away from the West End.

This commitment to Thamesmead – to improve, grow and look after it for the long-term – is possible because we are the main land-owners. That means we can take a patient approach to investment, working with our local authority partners as place-makers and custodians of the area. Our strategic decisions will consider things that developers generally do not – because we are the landlord, with responsibility for the land, the buildings and the public realm in perpetuity. As part of what is an enormous task – I struggle to think of a comparable area or project – we will be considering all the things that create a sense of place every day. Getting the right community infrastructure, such as public spaces, schools, doctors’ surgeries and leisure facilities are essential. A rich cultural “scene” – emanating from the talent and drive of local people – will help foster a sense of belonging and attachment to the area. This already exists, and it is part of our job to help it grow. So we have spent a lot of time engaging with local people and now – 3 years since we became involved in the area – we feel we have a much more developed understanding of what is required to enhance the town. This year we have made significant progress – in South Thamesmead we developed, consulted and agreed the regeneration strategy. We have secured detailed planning consent for 525 new homes by Southmere Lake close to the new Elizabeth line station at Abbey Wood and are in the process of evaluating a design competition for a new purpose-built library on the site. We’ve set about investing more than £9m in the area’s public realm and are also reinvigorating the derelict Lakeside Centre. This will be refurbished and reopened,

RIGHT TOP: South Thamesmead RIGHT BELOW: Thamesmead Gateway LEFT BELOW: Waterfront aerial

working with Bow Arts Trust to deliver a new cultural hub. Across the local authority border – the town straddles the Royal Borough of Greenwich and the London Borough of Bexley – we have expanded our plans for the West Thamesmead Gateway by buying a neighbouring site. We will shortly be launching our search for a strategic investor partner to help us create the Thamesmead Waterfront, an undeveloped area in the town, which could deliver up to 11,500 new homes and a new town centre designed around the proposed DLR extension to Thamesmead. We became the first housing zone developer to start on-site at The Reach – a 66 home all affordable scheme in West Thamesmead. We have developed a land-use strategy for the town, and the GLA and the two local authorities are developing Thamesmead's first Opportunity Area Planning Framework. At the same time, we have stepped up our services for existing residents - launching a new Caretaker Plus service and creating new interventions to tackle damp and mould in our older stock. We’ve also introduced a property MOT service and undertaken several communal improvements for residents. At the Moorings, we are using the principles of our Children’s Community in Hackney to support residents into enterprise, employment and learning. We held a “future skills expo” in June which was attended by nearly 500 residents. The town’s first ever gaming festival (gaming is a £4bn industry in the UK) also attracted 1,000 people over the course of 4 days over the summer. This is complemented by the expansion of our core community investment activities – providing local access to activities that support health, wealth and wellbeing for people of all ages.. !

Five goals for Thamesmead Looking to the future, we have set ourselves five goals that will guide us over the next five years. Goal 1 is about the people – Thamesmead’s greatest asset. We will put them at the heart of this regeneration because it is communities that make successful places Goal 2 is improving the day-to-day experience of living in Thamesmead. This means sorting out the basics and delivering reliably good housing management services. The service we provide as a landlord and landowner will be critical in the success of the regeneration. We will listen extensively to residents and act on their concerns. Goal 3 is around growth and physical regenera-

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tion. We will maintain a comprehensive land-use and transport strategy that is aligned with the two local authorities’ growth plans. We’ll deliver the Housing Zone programme, completing a minimum of 2,600 homes. We’ll progress our mixed approach to the South Thamesmead estate. This will be a complex endeavour probably involving some Compulsory Purchase Order, managing decant processes and ensuring that multiple construction projects are phased well with minimal disruption for residents. We’ll also have made significant decisions around Thamesmead Waterfront and other areas of change. Goal 4 is about Thamesmead’s landscape. We want to make Thamesmead into one of London’s

most bio-diverse and sustainable urban living environments, increasing the number of people who visit and enjoy Thamesmead’s unique parks and waterways. The town has three designated nature reserves already. Goal 5 relates to culture, arts and heritage. We will support and connect local talent and make space and opportunities for artists to make Thamesmead their place to be. We are going to celebrate Thamesmead’s identity, creating confidence and excitement in the future. Public art will proliferate! We hope that these opportunities will help Thamesmead finally begin to realise its potential as London’s new town

Issue 103 October-December 2017

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Planning in London

SMART BUILDINGS | ROY MCGOWAN AND DAVE MURPHY

Smart buildings and urban servicing London’s growing economy, regeneration and development brings many benefits, but there is a need to support these with suitable delivery and servicing strategies says Roy McGowan say Dave Murphy and Roy McGowan

Dave Murphy is a principal consultant at Momentum Transport

Roy McGowan is a director of Momentum Transport Planning

Servicing and delivery areas for large developments can result in a large amount of space being required, particularly at ground level. New developments often have to balance the need for a servicing space and arrangements against the need to maximise efficiency for floor space that is at a premium. It is not uncommon for these back of house areas to be shoehorned in, or compromised (maybe resorting to on-street arrangements) to accommodate all the other essential requirements and plant to operate the building successfully. Coupled with this, is the wider traffic impact of goods and servicing vehicles in London that, whilst a necessity, contribute to traffic congestion, together with the air quality issues that come with it This impacts upon peoples’ daily lives costing time, money and reducing quality of living and the experience of other road users. Focusing on these issues raises the question of whether delivery and servicing can be undertaken in a different or smarter way that benefits the developers, building users and the local road network. The production of Delivery and Servicing Plans is commonplace, which aims to manage deliveries, consolidate where possible and generally reduce the impact, so innovation for solutions is already on the agenda. However, what if there was a way of addressing these needs to achieve greater benefits if you had a clean slate to work with? What if an alternative delivery strategy could free up these areas for other spatial requirements, such as utility plant, or for occupant use such as leisure, retail or commercial? If there were no constraints, what could be possible? A Different Approach Momentum Transport Consultancy considered this topic as part of a submission for The City Centre’s Smarter Cities innovation competition. This proposes a combination of measures with the advancement of technology that contribute towards reducing the floor space required for servicing as well as the need for Light Goods vehicle trips in general. Servicing delivery areas are usually located at ground or basement level. Space is at a premium in general, however the ground and basement levels often have to accommodate, access and lobby areas to the building as a whole as well as retail, plant, back of house operational areas, car/cycle parking and storage. These spaces can therefore become crowded with every square foot needing to be used as effectively as possible. In order to avoid impacting on the local highway network, servicing areas are often required to be located off-street by authorities to maintain traffic flow. This is also desirable for building operations, in terms of security and ease of manage-

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ment. An alternative strategy that allows the release or reduction of delivery space on site, whilst avoiding impacting on local and strategic traffic flow would offer benefits to building users, the local network as well as developers.

How could things change The potential to reduce the space required on-site could be achieved under two approaches: by specific building design, and by a city wide strategy. The provision of roof-top servicing areas for drone deliveries could well be an option. Recent advances in drone technology and real world testing by Amazon show the potential for smaller deliveries to be undertaken by drones. There would be no need for vans undertaking multiple drops on the network, parking and taking up road space to deliver a single item to an office or residents block. These could be delivered overhead, almost unnoticed from the street. The onward distribution from the work top could be facilitated by automated delivery chutes, or in house management as normal. Smart booking systems could direct all non urgent/perishable deliveries to a central consolidation centre to reduce peak traffic impact. Commercial and retail buildings rely heavily on delivery and servicing, but do not necessarily receive full loads. The use of consolidation centres can reduce the number of deliveries required to any one site– but if the general practice was to facilitate deliveries overnight or out of hours, this would reduce the impact during peak times. Larger developments require a greater number of servicing bays to accommodate the multiple deliveries. A commitment to maximum consolidation can result in fewer vehicles visiting each building and subsequently require fewer servicing bays, reduce on-street unloading and congestion within and around the building. Driverless vehicles are an exciting development in transport management. Autonomous vehicle or robot deliveries will be able to offer efficient out of hours servicing and potentially negate the need to provide turning space in servicing areas. If an autonomous vehicle was multi-directional, there is no need for it to physically turn around on site, hence the need to provide a turning space becomes redundant. We can already see examples of Starship Technologies’ delivery robots roaming the streets illustrating what is already achievable on a smaller scale. The use of a central London consolidation centre could support this strategy by providing a central location for deliveries. This could operate as a conventional consolidation centre, but also ease the delivery of smaller or more urgent deliveries by more sustainable methods. Goods could then be delivered by aerial drones or as part of

Issue 103 October-December 2017

SMART BUILDINGS | ROY MCGOWAN

a coordinated delivery route operated by the Coordination Centre at night or via electric bikes / cars, or a more efficient multi-drop delivery route outside of peak hours relieving pressure on the transport network.

What are the challenges? Some of the measures mentioned require a step up in commitment and technological advancement to provide the strategic support, whilst others can be introduced in isolation. Naturally there are many real and justified challenges to such a change in our approach to delivery and servicing ranging from technology, policy and general strategy. There are obvious restrictions over the use of drones in busy urban areas and there is a little way to go for the technology required to avoid conflicts with multiple drones and other air activity â&#x20AC;&#x201C; effectively requiring an entirely new air/traffic management strategy. For a central London consolidation centre to work effectively there is the obvious question of where would such a space be found and how many would we need? If we were truly seeking a significant reduction in peak traffic, the delivery timings would need to be regulated and businesses and commercial enterprises would need to be behind the scheme RIGHT: Islington Sustainable Energy Partnership

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to deliver benefits. As mentioned there are a number of urgent deliveries for which a consolidation centre may not be practical. Notwithstanding this, the highlight of the central location is the ability for smaller deliveries to be undertaken by bicycles, electric vehicles and drones for which out of town centres would not be feasible. We would also need a smart booking system that inter links all businesses and enables a reliable and efficient consolidation of goods. Whilst there may well be different operators, if they are not inter linked the opportunities for consolidating neighbouring buildingsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; deliveries can be missed. As well as a commitment to the use of consolidation centres, there would also need to be support for deliveries to be undertaken out of hours and a need to protect the amenity for residents. The direction of servicing and transport is heading towards quieter electric methods that would not necessarily generate more than minimal noise, if deliveries were able to be accommodated on site because of the reduced space requirement, perhaps these operations could take place unnoticed. It is likely that we will see a movement towards these practices over the next decade, it is just a question of the extent to which they will be achieved. !

GRENFELL TOWER | DAVID BECKENHAM

The Grenfell Tower tragedy: issues prosecutors should consider These events will serve as a tragic reminder to everyone involved in the design and construction industry as to the responsibility that rests upon their shoulders says David Beckenham

The recent events at Grenfell Tower have sparked national outcry and raised important safety questions. It seems that the cladding applied to the external part of the building may well have contributed to the abnormally rapid spreading of the fire. So where does this leave the various parties involved with the design, manufacture and installation of said cladding? These parties will include not just the private companies and consultants involved with the project, but also the local authority which would have commissioned the works, agreed the specification and monitored the installation, or engaged others to do so for them. At this stage there is no clear view of whom is to blame, but prosecution cannot and should not be ruled out, not least because of the high profile nature of the incident. So, what are the key issues to be considered by the police, CPS and, possibly, a jury? Firstly the investigation will concentrate upon identifying whether there is significant evidence to support charges of gross negligence manslaughter or corporate manslaughter. Gross Negligence Manslaughter Gross negligence manslaughter is a form of involuntary manslaughter where the defendant is ostensibly acting lawfully. Involuntary manslaughter may arise where the defendant has caused death but neither intended to cause death nor intended to cause serious bodily harm. While constructive manslaughter (or unlawful act manslaughter) exists where the defendant commits an unlawful act which results in death - gross negligence manslaughter is not dependant on demonstrating that an unlawful act has been committed. Gross negligence manslaughter can be said to apply where the defendant commits a lawful act in such a way as to render those actions as criminal. The test for gross negligence manslaughter is: 1 Was there a duty of care owed by the defendant to the deceased; 2 Did a breach of that duty of care lead to the death(s); 3 Did the behaviour of the defendant fall so far below the standard which could reasonably have been expected that it warrants criminal liability.

David Beckenham is a health and safety lawyer with Keystone Law

Corporate Manslaughter The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 creates a means of accountability for deaths caused by serious management failings. Prior to the act coming into force, a corporate entity, could be prosecuted for a wide range

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of criminal offences, including the common law offence of gross negligence manslaughter. However, in order for the company to be guilty of the offence, it was also essential for someone with overall responsibility, who could be said to embody the company, to also be guilty. As of the 2007 legislation, the offence is now concerned with corporate liability and does not apply to directors or other senior individuals in the company or organisation. The test for corporate manslaughter is broadly similar to that of gross negligence in that the organisation (there is no individual liability under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007) is guilty of an offence if the way in which its activities are managed or organised: 1 Causes a person’s death; 2 Amounts to a gross breach of a relevant duty of care owed by the organisation to the deceased. The organisation is guilty of an offence only if the way in which its activities were managed or organised by its senior management is a substantial element in the breach. So far as the charge of gross negligence manslaughter is concerned, issues will arise for the prosecution should they identify negligence on the part of a number of people but no single person’s negligence led to the fire. The offence does not allow the aggregation of various people’s negligence to be taken into account. The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 does allow for aggregation of negligence but does not allow for individual liability. Was One Entity to Blame? On a project such as the refurbishment of a high rise tower, there would have been more than one person or corporation responsible for some element of design. However, it is also likely that one entity or person had overall responsibility for design. As lead consultant, architects would normally assume this role. But it is not just that consultant’s scope of service or assumption of responsibility that should be scrutinised here. It would be more appropriate to assess likely liability for gross negligence, in this instance, within the realms of what they should do about high risk fire issues, at law. That boils down to one issue. Which of the entities involved had a duty to warn? In this case that question can probably be reduced to the issue of who had knowledge, and who ought to have had knowledge, of the issue with the cladding? Of course, deciphering who had a duty to warn is not easy to determine in itself. Some involved on the project may have been

Issue Issue 103 103 October-December October-December 2017 2017

GRENFELL TOWER |

RIGHT: Grenfell Tower, before

unaware that the cladding was not fire retardant. Some, despite knowing that it was not, may still be entitled to assume that design would be implemented which prevented the cladding from spreading fire.

Designerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Liability and a Duty to Warn While there is no general duty to warn in English Law, there is a duty to warn where there is danger to the lives of humans there is such a duty (see Akenhead J, in Cleightonhills v Bembridge Marine). Ultimately, all the construction professionals, contracted with the Council, who knew that the cladding was not fireproof are likely to have had a duty to warn, unless the circumstances show that they could have, feasibly, assumed the cladding would then become fire proofed during the installation process. Once it is established that someone owes a duty to warn, to comply with their duty they must proceed with extreme caution. Ordinarily, simply warning an employer, for example, of a risk of catastrophic fire is not enough. One must warn vigorously or, where the risk is high, simply refuse to proceed with the works, perhaps even take steps to prevent others from proceeding. Without seeing the contracts, professional appointments, and explanations as to why decisions were made, it would be inappropriate to attempt to place definitive blame on the cladders, contractors, architect, engineers, those checking building regulation compliance, or the employer. But, on the face of it, if there was a lead designer or consultant, that individual may find it difficult to argue that they did not have a duty to warn. Meanwhile, the assumption that others will be â&#x20AC;&#x153;designing outâ&#x20AC;?

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a fire risk is likely to protect the lead consultant. Indeed, it may be that those with overall design responsibility may only be able to vindicate proceeding, once aware of a fire risk, with the cladding installation, if they had been told expressly that the cladding was fire retardant.

Commercial v Residential Buildings While the Grenfell Tower disaster relates directly to the use of cladding in high rise residential buildings, the tragic events undoubtedly raise questions and concerns over commercial properties in addition. The nature of cladding selected for a building will vary depending on considerations such as purpose, conditions, cost, local context, planning and building regulation requirements as well as structural obligations. However, the key issues to consider when it comes to liability and prosecutions in circumstances such as these remain the same, irrespective of whether the building as a residential or commercial purpose. As enquiries continue, it remains unclear who may find themselves standing in the dock but it could well be any of the designers, contractors or even the local authority which commissioned the works. From this list it is possible that all three entities could be prosecuted for breaching a duty to warn. Whether a breach of a duty to warn in this instance constitutes gross negligence manslaughter or corporate manslaughter will ultimately be a matter for the jury to decide. But one thing is for certain, these events will serve as a tragic reminder to everyone involved in the design and construction industry as to the importance of safety and the responsibility that rests upon their shoulders. !

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PLANNING POLICY | MICHAEL BACH

Can the planning system meet the need for policy change? Changing policy to deal with new challenges – such as basement developments – is a very slow process says Michael Bach

Michel Bach, London Forum of Civic and Amenity Societies

Planning in London

Is the British planning system too slow to respond to new challenges? How long does it take to get an effective response? The British planning system – at Government and local level – is very slow to respond to a crisis – too slow to acknowledge the problem, to develop solutions and often too tentative, too reasonable and too limited. As a result, the lead-times for new policies are too long, with solutions arriving after the horse has bolted. The Government in particular is slow to acknowledge problems and resists changes to legislation and policy – such as the need for changes to the NPPF. Local planning authorities have to wait for the next opportunity to change their Local Plan – this can delay their ability to keep pace. It can also take several attempts to produce an effective solution. But one thing is certain, change is often only due to public pressure – the public is often ahead of the politicians and the officers. Case Study: Basement Policy in Kensington and Chelsea Kensington and Chelsea is at the sharp end of development pressures, due to high property values and an active development sector. Basements are not a new issue – additional basements and extensions of half-basements under gardens existed before 2000 – in 2001 there were 46 applications rising to 77 in 2002. The revised UDP in 2002 actually contained a basement policy (CD32), but was primarily concerned solely with the outcome rather than the impact of the construction process – the impact on the amenity of neighbours, the risk to structural stability of adjoining buildings especially listed buildings and unlisted buildings in conservation areas, the loss of open space, trees and archaeological remains and the provision of landscaping and adequate soil depth. This policy proved ineffectual in the face of bankers’ bonuses in search of a capital gains free home – sinking money into a basement appeared to be an attractive investment. By 2007 basement applications had reached 185. Local residents’ association leaders had a crisis meeting with the Cabinet Member to develop a new stronger policy. They were alarmed by the depth (some 2 or more storeys), the extent (under the whole property – the house and the garden), the duration of excavation and construction work (often 2-3 years), the impact of the construction process on neighbours and the fundamental unsustainability of such developments. In 2008, the Council decided to commission research from Arups to underpin the development of a new policy in the

emerging Local Development Framework (LDF). This new plan took until the end of 2010 to complete, including an SPG to guide developments. In the meantime, the pressure for new basement had plateaued due to the financial recession at 182 applications in 2010. The 2010 LDF policy, however, introduced additional requirements – no excavation under listed buildings, the need to retrofit the entire building to Ecohomes VG standard (to mitigate their unsustainability) and the need provide SUDs to reduce surface water runoff. However, the policy failed to address the problems identified by residents in 2007 - the scale, extent and duration of the demolition, excavation and construction work and the cumulative effect of successive schemes. Within less than two years, however, residents were telling the Council that these pressures had become intolerable and a complete overhaul in the policy was necessary to contain the scale of developments and the need for additional safeguards for neighbours. In 2012, the Council commissioned further research to develop a new, tougher basement policy The basement development industry had burgeoned between 2007 and 2012 and the main contractors canvassed residents to get their applications in quickly before the policy came in, resulting in an increase in planning application from 307 in 2012, to 450 in 2013 and 393 in 2014. The new policy CL7: Basements was adopted in late 2014 after a hard-fought battle at the Examination in Public between the basement developers/contractors, the Council and residents. It was followed by a new Basements SPG, to explain the operation of the policy, a new Streets SPG, which set the standards for construction traffic management plans (CTMPs), and a new Code of Construction Practice in 2016, which set tougher standards for working hours and construction noise.

Local Plan Policy CL7 (2014) The new policy, in addition to the 2010 policy, also: • limits basements to 1 storey covering the footprint and up to 50% of the gardens; and • reduces the impact of traffic and construction activities, including traffic movement, noise, vibration and dust, through the CTMP, the Code of Practice and agreements under environmental health legislation. A major omission, cut out by the Local Plan Inspector, was the mitigation measure to reduce total CO2 emissions by requiring improved energy efficiency to offset the energy requirements of demolition, excavation, concrete and construction work, leaving basements as a highly unsustainable form of

development. To put this issue into perspective, between 2001 and 2016 there were 3,340 applications for basements in Kensington and Chelsea, of which 80% were granted – see map. Basement development is still a very active, and in some streets, there has been a series of developments over the last decade. It has blighted the lives of neighbours. There was some uncertainty about permitted development rights for basements under the footprint of a house, which was not resolved by a court case in Camden. As a result, a number of London Boroughs have or are in the process of securing Article 4 Directions, including Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Camden, Richmond and Hammersmith and Fulham, which have brought such developments within planning control. So that’s sorted then? Despite the efforts to tie up the loose ends, basements are a fundamentally unsustainable form of development. The cumulative effects of successive or concurrent projects are still a problem. Growing concerns about air quality mean that controls are needed to limit emissions from construction machinery as well as construction traffic – like noise and vibration, conditions are needed to secure the best practicable technology. The rules on construction noise need updating to limit the noise from construction in dense residential areas. All this suggests the need for combined consents for planning, transport and environmental issues that are readily enforceable. Living next to a basement project is hell!

Government and London Plan policy The basement issue was originally regarded by the Government, the Mayor of London and many London Boroughs as a matter of “private grief” – a local matter driven by high property values and wealthy “investors” - only affecting certain Central London Boroughs, such as Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Camden and Hammersmith and Fulham. This has changed as more London Boroughs have needed to develop a policy. Indeed, the London Plan now has a policy, largely driven by the sustainability of such developments and an SPG on Sustainable Design and Construction. The Government – an indication of how slowly/cautiously they act – produced some good practice guidance a long time ago, since withdrawn. The issue of basements was raised in the debates on the Housing and Planning Act 2016, which led to a DCLG consultation “Basement Development and the Planning System” in November 2016. The Government is still considering what to do about basement developments, although it has conceded the need to amend Party Wall legislation. Changing policy to deal with new challenges – such as base-

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ment developments – is a very slow process. Kensington and Chelsea was a pioneer and, after several attempts, it took 15 years to get robust policy. In the meantime, the horse had bolted, and there are still applications for new basement schemes as well as for renewals and for Certificates to verify material starts. This type of development imposes considerable harm to residents’ amenity for several years and, with successive schemes, even a decade. The planning system has, quite rightly, been “stretched” to give more weight to environmental harm, but in terms of sustainability it has not even begun to assess the harm. n

Issue 103 October-December 2017

SPACE TO BUILD | ALICE ROBERTS

A million new homes need no Greenfields The CPRE report Space to Build shows how wasted land in London can meet the need for housing. Alice Roberts explains

ABOVE: Mid-rise, high density development is not a new concept. RIGHT: High density development at East Village in Stratford, part of the regeneration of the ex-industrial 2012 Olympics site

Alice Roberts is a Green Spaces campaigner, at CPRE’s London branch

Planning in London

Our report ‘Space to Build’ details a range of opportunities to use suitable wasted space in London. The sources range from redeveloping existing single storey buildings into ‘midrise’ developments, including mixed-use – commercial, or industrial, plus residential – to reclaiming road space and disused garages, which offer enormous potential for new housing. It shows: 1. Sites for 560,000 homes have already been identified by planners 2. Airspace – above existing buildings – could provide at least 500,000 homes 3. Small sites can deliver more than 100,000 homes 4. Estate regeneration could deliver up to 360,000 homes 5. Car parks can provide space for 75,000 homes 6. Disused garages can provide space for 16,000 homes 7. Reclaiming roads and roundabouts could provide space for 10,000 homes 8. Increasing housing densities in Outer London could deliver 20,000 homes each year 9. Bringing empty homes back into use can deliver 5,000 homes Londoners would probably be surprised to know that permissions have in fact already been granted for 260,000 homes in the capital. At the current build rate of 25,000 new homes per year, that alone will keep us going for 10 years. With all the other opportunities identified in our report, which don’t involve a return to high rise development, we have enough space to be building for 40 years.

And brownfield space is not finite: more comes on stream every year. We believe it is premature, to say the least, to be allocating London’s green space for housing or other developments.

Airspace Building up need not mean building high-rise. Mid-rise development is not a new concept: Victorian and Georgian mansion blocks are a common sight in London. Developers are increasingly building into London’s airspace, even redeveloping relatively new buildings. Mid-rise development

done well is going to be key to finding the space we need in London to build new housing. Mixed use development London is full of wasted space. Some of it is not immediately obvious because it might be the space above a building which may not even be particularly old. Where land values allow and the owners are willing, small sites like the onestorey Topps Tiles on Stamford Hill, can be redeveloped to provide space for housing. That building was by no means at the end of its life, but it is currently being redeveloped to retain commercial space and introduce new residential units on top. As in this case, the development need not be any higher than the surrounding buildings. Retail parks More recently we have been looking in greater detail at the many sprawling retail parks in London with extensive surface car parks and one-storey commercial outlets. They are often near to train stations and could readily be reworked to plan for new mixed-use neighbourhoods with homes and jobs, retaining commercial space, but adding in residential in appropriately scaled, mid-rise development. The retail park on the A10 in Enfield is a good example of a place that feels like it is from another era, drive-thru doughnut

outlet and all! Clearly this kind of site is complex and requires a lot of input and work in bringing it forward. Some of London’s Boroughs seem more open to this opportunity than others and some sites are, admittedly, exceptionally difficult. Nonetheless, we are keen to promote this and the other ideas in Space to Build so that Local Plans do not unnecessarily allocate green space for housing.

Redundant car-related infrastructure Already multi-storey car parks are looking archaic though many continue to blight London’s town centres and take up prime space which could readily be used for mixed or residential developments. But the planned ‘modal shift’ – away from cars, towards public transport, walking and cycling – in London, ultimately will free up a huge amount of space. Councils are now looking to redevelop small surface car parks and disused garages. Some are even looking at reclaiming road space, like in Hackney where the council is consulting on removing the incongruous roundabout in Clapton. The reinstatement of the crossroads would free up space for commercial and residential development, for example, while also creating a new vibrant town centre. Re-working retail parks and reclaiming road space can also make London a much nicer place. We can embrace or ignore these opportunities.

ABOVE: The A10 retail park in Enfield: a space that could do more?(Credit, Google maps Street view)

>>> LEFT: Disused garages are a Familiar site in London (credit, Sludge G on Flikr)

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Issue 103 October-December 2017

SPACE TO BUILD | ALICE ROBERTS

>>> So why are councils still identifying greenfield sites to build housing on? There is a huge difference between housing targets and what is actually being built. So, while London has recently seen around 20,000 to 25,000 units built each year, the target expected to be set out in the London Plan may be more like 70,000 per year. Councils are required to allocate land according to the target, not in line with realistic build rates. This forces councils to look to greenfield sites because (they say) they can’t find suitable brownfield sites. Even more problematic, because they are required to show a five year supply of ‘deliverable’ sites, councils sometimes argue that the green sites should be in the first phase i.e. developed ahead of brownfield sites, because the brownfield sites will take too long to bring forward (for lots of reasons, many of which may be legitimate). But land protections exist precisely to encourage the development of previously developed – ie. brownfield – land, so in taking this approach, the entire land protection system is undermined. What impact does over-allocation of land for housing have? The Government continues to present the problem as one of land supply. But the only real impact that over-allocation of land has is to give developers a wide choice of sites, including greenfield sites – nearly 450 of them in London’s Green Belt alone according to our research. The only ones set to benefit from the release of greenfield land will be landowners and the big housebuilders, not communities in need of decent, affordable housing. New evidence RIGHT: The Lee Bridge Road roundabout in Hackney: reinstating the crossroads could create space to build (credit, Google maps)

Planning in London

has shown that the vast majority of housing proposed for Green Belt sites will not be affordable: see Green Belt Under Seige www.cpre.org.uk. Housing targets are looking increasingly like an excuse for forcing profitable green sites, previously protected from development, onto the market, leaving brownfield sites idle. This is just poor planning. We urgently need to take a new approach. If land supply is not the problem, what do we need to do? There is a growing recognition that we cannot rely on just a small number of so-called volume housebuilders to meet housing needs. Many are now exploring how the housebuilding sector can be diversified to improve build rates. And there are renewed calls for local authorities to be enabled to build genuinely affordable homes, though recent evidence on declining provision of affordable housing is not reassuring. As a start, CPRE London is calling for: 1. More realistic housing targets - Councils should not be required to set targets, and allocate sites, for double the number of homes likely to be built; 2. The enforcement of a ‘brownfield first’ approach - There should be a clear requirement for all suitable brownfield sites and other wasted spaces outlined in the report to be built out before any greenfield site is considered for development; and 3. More affordable homes to solve the housing crisis - There should be a refocusing of housing policy and public investment on delivering genuinely affordable homes. n

A BLUE-GREEN GRID | LARS CHRISTIAN

A blue-green grid for all Londoners Lars Christian proposes that London's blue and green assets should be more accessible, better linked and better managed

RIGHT: Figure 1 shows the distribution of outdoor swimming locations per borough in blue, with a fair distribution in half of inner London (5 of 11 boroughs), but negligible in outer London (4 of 20) ES'17. Five outer boroughs with above average greenspace, three existing and four potential regional parks are shown in green. Four potential mixed-use viaducts are shown in red.

Lars Christian, UrbanPilot, is an architect and town planner educated in Scotland and works as an independent spatial and transport consultant in London and Scandinavia

London has a fantastic collection of parks, woods, commons, rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, lidos, playgrounds, sports pitches, playing fields and golf courses. In inner London, many of the largest parks, the Thames and the smaller public gardens and squares are typically close to where many local people live, close to tube and train stations, along busy bus routes and readily accessible by bicycle. In outer London by comparison, the green assets are typically larger, but sometimes less accessible and frequented. But can more be done to open up the blue-green grid to more people? Can more inhabitants easier access the grid in their adjacent neighbourhoods? Can more families, the elderly and singles access the grid without having access to or owning a car? Can more children enjoy the blue-green grid more often? Can more young, middle aged and elderly access the grid for both organised and unorganised sports – as well as informal physical and social activities? And can the grid play a bigger part in reducing social isolation among singles – whether young, parents, adults, elderly, the sick, infirm, long term unemployed or inactive? This article explores some of the strengths and the weaknesses of the blue-green assets of London, and presents nine primary objectives for how the grid can be further developed, expanded, enhanced, linked and accessed. The article coincides with a London Assembly report on green spaces, the mayor's draft London Environmental Strategy, the London National Park City initiative and Public Health England announcing that 2 in 5 middle aged adults exercise less than ten minutes a month. A blue grid for recreation & exercise Improving the health of the inhabitants of London by improving access to water should be a primary objective of the bluegreen grid of the city. Providing a swimming pond or lido per borough could be a priority. At present ten of 32 boroughs offer fourteen locations, four of them heated; six locations in four 'inner' north boroughs, two in one north west, two east and three southwest boroughs. Returning shallow pools to places such as Victoria and Peckham Rye parks could be a priority, deep enough to allow for leisure swimming but shallow enough to do without lifeguards at most times. Naturally filtered shallow pools for leisure swimming can also be accommodated in selected tributaries, canals, docks and basins. Thames national activity park Adapting the quaysides of the Thames to create a linear national activity park should be a prime objective. Open from early morning to mid evening for all Londoners – the elderly, cyclists, joggers and children alike – to enjoy seamlessly along both sides of the 29 mile long river within the capital.

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The various quieter semi-private and semi-public quays and pathways could typically be returned to more intense public use. Partly by providing more outdoor exercise equipment, quiet sand courts and smaller sport courts. Pre-school nurseries could typically be located on the lower floors of adjacent buildings, with children's play spaces open to the public at the weekends. More barge moorings could be provided along quieter parts on the (side) rivers, basins, canals and docks.

Larger (country) parks as cycling nodes The country parks and golf courses are typically the biggest green assets. Linking the larger parks better to communities up to five miles away should be a primary objective, including linking the two to three largest parks in each borough. So that arriving by bike can be the default mode of transport for a majority of visitors – at both quieter and busier times and during drier and wetter months – devoid of obstacles such as stiles or kissing gates. Returning the greenbelt to the city-zens Opening up the metropolitan greenbelt to all Londoners should be a primary objective. At present Lee Valley, Colne Valley and Epping Forest especially cater for inhabitants from the adjacent five outer and two inner boroughs. But there are another eight peripheral boroughs with below average green space that could benefit from improved greenbelt access. Establishing three new regional parks in the south-east, south, and north-west respectively could be an objective. Only 7 per cent of the greenbelt is within the borders of London, and it reaches on average 10 miles into the neighbouring counties. Redesignating and adapting all greenbelt footpaths to cyclists could potentially allow all Londoners access to the >>>

Issue Issue 103 103 October-December October-December 2017 2017

A BLUE-GREEN GRID | LARS CHRISTIAN

RIGHT: Figure 2 shows a double H-shaped segregated green grid e-cycling network reaching five miles out from a number 8-shaped tram and cycle loop along the inner ring road at Heathrow airport. The two together reach an area equal to one seventh of London, potentially allowing a quarter of a million employees to commute to the airport area by tram or bike.

>>> greenbelt by bike – families and the elderly included – directly from their home. A green grid for (e-)bike commuters Enhancing the green grid for cyclists – benefiting both weekend and evening leisure users as well as weekday commuters – should be a primary objective. Routes could be specifically designed and comprehensively signposted to best accommodate leisure users at the weekend and commuters during weekday peak hours. Signposting to and from destinations away from the grid is as important as signposting the grid itself. Investing in orbital shared commuter and leisure cycling routes linking the largest green assets in the twenty outer boroughs could also be an objective. Not least because e-bike commuting may be the quickest alternative to car commuting for a majority of suburban households to major suburban employment and shopping destinations. Especially where commuting and visits take place at all hours of the day and night, with no typical peak hours, to places such as Heathrow, the three Westfields, and the seven out-of-centre mega-hospitals.

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links on both riversides – reducing the pressure on existing and planned road toll tunnels. In the western suburbs of Berlin, electric solar ferries cater for up to 300 passengers and 60 bikes per crossing, including free onward journeys by bus and train.

Parks as nursery playgrounds Using all gardens, parks and squares of London more intensively by pre-school nursery children on weekdays should be a primary objective. Medium size parks and squares could accommodate play areas reserved for nursery school children during normal daytime working hours and for all children at other times. With pre-school nurseries in adjacent buildings and within selected larger parks themselves. To facilitate the former, nurseries should be accommodated by default in the ground and first floors of adjacent residential, commercial and mixed-use buildings.

Social and physical well being and inclusion Providing for numerous more random social encounters outdoors between one million Londoners living alone, whether young, adult or elderly, should be a primary objective. Sand pitches, sport courts, outdoor gyms, dog parks and barista vans are examples of locations where adult singles can meet at random in their neighbourhood – and should be provided in all green grid locations, irrespective of size. All elderly should be able to sit down for free at any time – in all parks, squares and gardens – and safely knowing this before arriving at their chosen location. This could include elderly only or prioritised provisions, where political will or funds are limited, or where selected groups are unwanted in certain locations or at certain times. Public parks, squares and gardens can also better provide for the young, the middle aged and the elderly enjoying sports – including exercise machines, tai chi, low impact aerobics etc. Providing smaller sports pitches is particularly appropriate if they also act as meeting places for other users – watching, socialising etc – and encourage all Londoners to participate in regular unorganised exercise.

Green viaducts bridging the Thames Linking the blue-green grid across the Thames should be a primary objective. More crossings are particularly neigh in east London where two million inhabitants have no bridges at all. Building four mixed-use bridges for buses, DLR/trams/trains, cyclists and pedestrians would revolutionise travel and commuting between riverside neighbourhoods in eight eastern boroughs: i) Linking Lakeside and Bluewater by bike, buses and tram on the borders between Kent, Essex and London; ii) Linking Barking to Thamesmead by bike and buses, DLR and overground, iii) Linking the Greenwich peninsula by bike, buses and a new north/south DLR line and iv) Linking Canary Wharf to Rotherhithe by bike and buses east/west (figure 1). Improved ferry crossings are an interim and/or medium term possibility in all four locations with improved bus and bike

Public mixed-use paths as arteries Lastly, four changes in the legislation on footpaths within London and the metropolitan greenbelt should be a primary objective – partly to give all Londoners the opportunity to exercise half an hour a day. First, all footpaths within the greenbelt should be reassigned as mixed-use paths, accommodating free and non-motorised access for all nine million Londoners deep into the seven adjacent counties. Second, footpaths within the built up areas of London should be reassigned as mixed-use paths, including through parks and along streams and rivers. Third, reassigning restricted roads and paths, fenced off by infrastructure and utility companies throughout the city and the greenbelt, as mixed-use paths. Fourth, supplement on-surface train and tube corridors with mixed-use paths – on both circular and radial routes throughout the city and the greenbelt. Initially, inviting the two track

companies to open up a couple of hundred shorter sections, could open up missing links that may complete a few hundred longer routes that are unconnected at present. An urban blue-green renaissance This article has argued that London and Londoners can turn their city into a truly blue-green sustainable city by pursuing nine overall strategic objectives enhancing the city's blue and green assets and infrastructure. Cycling is at the heart of this transformation, including linking existing blue-green assets to form a green grid for weekday commuters and weekend recreation alike. The number of regional parks and proportion of publicly accessible metropolitan greenbelt land will double and all public footpaths transformed

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to mixed-use paths. Nursery playgrounds, sand pitches and sport courts will be added to most parks, squares, gardens and all along both sides of the river Thames. These and the river, side rivers, streams, canals, basins, lakes and ponds will have an enhanced role in promoting social and physical well being, including turning the former into a national riverside activity park. Four new green viaducts for bikes, buses, DLR/tram/trains and pedestrians will bridge riverside communities in eight eastern boroughs closer together. The nine primary objectives would be delivered by the Mayor of London, the 32 London boroughs, the surrounding sixteen districts and seven counties together. With parliament adopting changes to greenbelt and footpath legislation. !

ABOVE: The floating harbour beach in Copenhagen (dac.dk) and BELOW: Beach volleyball at Gleisdreieck in Berlin (berlinunwrapped.com)

Issue 103 October-December 2017

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COUNCIL HOUSES | JANICE MORPHET

Councils get back to building homes London Boroughs are among many local authorities establishing housing companies shows Janice Morphet

Janice Morphet is visiting professor Bartlett School of Planning

Planning in London

The Government’s publication of the methodology that local authorities will be required to use to determine Objectively Assessed Need (OAN) for housing in their areas is expected in September. Like other housing and planning methodologies that have preceded it – Strategic Housing Market Assessments, Strategic Land Availability Assessments, viability testing and Community Infrastructure Levy it is likely to remain a firm test for a brief period only. There is too much financial interest in housing development for any universal regime to remain untested through appeals, inquiries, Ministerial decisions and judicial review. Further, even if there is a process that is cast iron, will this result in the development of more housing that meets the housing needs of existing communities? This includes dwellings in a range of categories including that available for social rent, affordable rent and sale for those in the thirties and above still living at home, for families and for over 60s - none of which is being built in any substantial numbers, despite the increase in planning permissions that have been granted over recent years. How is this working in London? A recent study commissioned by Shelter1 found that a third of homes with planning consent have not been built in the last five years but they also found that this problem was particularly acute in London where 50 per cent of homes have not been built. While the Home Builders Federation continue to complain about planning delays, Shelter have stated that, in their methodology, they allowed a gap of one year between consent and build completion. If this had not been used then the differences between permissions and completions would have been higher. The HBF have identified larger sites where there are greater delays given the requirement for legal agreements for infrastructure that need to be completed before construction can start. Also according to the HBF’s Andrew Whittaker speaking at an RTPI Eastern Region event in June, build out rates on large sites are also lower than planners have anticipated. Yet the increase in planning consents could make a significant contribution to housing need. However, a recent report by Grant Thornton2, as part of the 50,000 homes campaign in London, has found that while planning applications for dwellings in London has reached 42,000 in the first six months of 2017, close to the estimated need of 50,000 per year, the main challenge is converting these consents into constructed dwellings. In 2015, the study estimates that 24,000 dwellings were completed in London, although some 15,000 have already been completed in 2017 so this number may increase. However, it is also important to note that 70 per cent of these dwellings are in zones 1-3, so the main challenges are seen to be in outer London, particularly in zones 5-6. If housing permissions and completions could be increased in these areas

then the 50,000 targets might be reached. The Government’s Housing and Finance Institute has also recently reported on this gap3, arguing that the London should be put into special measures and that the recommendations of Lord Kerslake’s London Housing Commission Report should be reconsidered. In this it is proposed that the London be exempt from the NPPF, with the Mayor being given special powers to force boroughs into housing delivery. Other proposals include allowing London to set its own planning fees, allowing the GLA and London Boroughs to borrow funds for housing (powers that they already have outside the HRA), devolve stamp duty and allow the boroughs to apply a development delay tax, which in effect would be the raising of council tax payments on consented but not completed dwellings. But will building more homes solve the problems of homelessness and unaffordable rents? This seems unlikely as according to the ONS4, there are more properties vacant – defined as being unoccupied for a six-month period- than at any time in the last twenty years. There are now 1.4 million empty homes with the largest number in Kensington and Chelsea with other south west London boroughs also high on the list. While there has been speculation that these empty properties have been purchased by people from overseas for investment through ‘buy to leave’, studies undertaken for the Mayor of London demonstrated that this was not the case. The University of York5 found that foreign purchasers are buying up to 13 per cent of new build stock and half of this is priced under £500,000 – that is at the more affordable end of the London market. This was supported by the finding that most foreign investor activity was in Westminster, Tower Hamlets and Greenwich, followed by Wandsworth, Kensington and Chelsea, Southwark and Hackney. The highest levels of foreign investor purchases in an outer borough was in Newham, where it was less than 5 per cent. When considering new build properties only, the highest level of foreign investment was in Westminster and K and C. In another study for the GLA, the LSE6 found that the new build properties that were purchased by foreign investors were primarily let to Londoners with others being occupied by family members. There was little evidence of intentional vacancy found. So, while new build properties may be increasing in their completion there is still a gap. Also, if these homes are available they will not necessary be available to those most in need? This is where London Boroughs and the Mayor of London are starting to build housing for multiple tenures again. While a largely dormant activity since Margaret Thatcher’s shift in public policy, local authorities, including most London Boroughs have decided to provide housing. In the case of the Mayor of London, then new housing is being

LEFT: Kingsdown by Mae Architects for Croydon’s in-house development company Brick by Brick

BELOW: Table 1 London Borough Housing Companies September 2017

provided on sites in ownership of the GLA family or organizations and, now predominantly from TfL of land both around stations and depots as well as on top of existing stations. In Table 1 there is a summary of current London Borough housing companies that have been set up to provide housing directly. What do these results indicate? Firstly, that most London Boroughs have set up their own housing companies and are committed to building for a variety of tenures, although there appears to be a preponderance of dwellings being made available for affordable rent. Secondly, while many of these companies are in their initial stages of operation – with many having been formed since 2014, it is likely they will build up their capacity. While many of the Boroughs have stated objectives to provide more affordable housing for their populations, it is also the case that a number have indicated that they wish to improve their income streams to replace central government grant funding from 2020 through rental income. Thirdly, many of these new homes are being built in the Mayor’s Housing Zones. Fourthly, while the 50,000 Homes Campaign review indicated that most new homes are being built in zones 1-3, the scale of activity proposed in the outer London boroughs – that is in zones 4-6+ appears to be greater, with Boroughs taking advantage of development opportunities around new infrastructure investment such as Crossrail, the DLR and the Overground. While London Boroughs appear to be committed to establishing housing companies to meet housing need and demand, they are not on their own with many other local authorities doing the same across England. The current research being undertaken for the National Planning Forum and the RTPI will be reporting on the position in more detail at the launch of their final report on 4th December. Not only will this provide more detail on numbers it will also give more indications of the major motivations for establishing housing companies and some indication of the major challenges that councils have found. n

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1 Shelter 'Phantom Homes' Research Planning Permissions, Completions and Profits, July 2017. Research Briefing. 2 http://www.fiftythousandhomes.london/news/2017/8/2 9/london-has-opportunity-toreverse-decades-of-housebuilding-shortfall 3 HFi Market Research Series: London and the Regions August 2017 http://thehfi.com/researchand-publications/hfi-housingmarket-research-series-londonand-the-regions/ 4 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/livetables-on-dwelling-stockincluding-vacants 5 Overseas Investors in London’s New Build Housing Market By Alison Wallace, David Rhodes and Richard Webber June 2017 http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ 117771/1/08b2c_University_of _York_data_report.pdf 6 The role of overseas investors in the London new-build residential market Final report for Homes for London Kath Scanlon, Christine Whitehead and Fanny Blanc with Ulises Moreno-Tabarez May 2017 https://www.london.gov.uk/mo derngovmb/documents/s5864 0/08b2b per cent20LSE per cent20Overseas per cent20Investment per cent20report.pdf

Issue 103 October-December 2017

BOOKS | NIGEL MOOR

Public Consultation and Community Involvement In Planning A Twenty-first Century Guide By Penny Norton and Martin Hughes Routledge 2018 ISBN 978-1-13868015-9 Review by Dr Nigel Moor

Dr Nigel Moor ran his own planning practice in London, Oxfordshire and East Anglia before it was acquired by RPS. He is now a Gloucestershire County Councillor with cabinet responsibility for Fire, Planning & Infrastructure and represents the Stow and Moreton division in the county.

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This is a long book dealing with a simple question. How do you engage the community in the debate about future development that is truly worthwhile and helpful. This question has challenged urban and rural planning for decades since the Skeffington report in 1969 recorded the disillusionment with planning following the post – war utopian optimism for reconstruction ( the late Sir John Betjeman excepted ).That question is still with us. The book is divided into four parts; The context of consultation today, The planning process, Communications strategy and tactics and Post planning. This prompts the observation as to why such a basically simple proposition as consulting the community should become so complex. But that of course is the elephant in the room in relation to all the innovations since the 1947 Act that have sought to improve and clarify the planning system. But putting my scepticism aside, the strength of this book is how it places public consultation and community involvement within the complexity of the planning system. It is unashamedly written as a text book and most practitioners will benefit from it being on their library shelves. This should guarantee sales. The chapter on the impact of the internet on community involvement is particularly good and the author`s observation “And as all demographic groups increasingly communicate online and hyperlocal websites and those of special interest construction issues. The Bournville Trust at their Lightmoor Village project groups continue to flourish, the need for developers and local being built at Telford New Town have invested heavily in comauthorities to have a proactive online presence will increase.” munity engagement and there is demonstrates the need for The book is divided into four parts; The a dedicated community advice practitioners to be fully and service facility in the village aware of the techniques and context of consultation today, The planning centre. This would have been a strategies advocated by the process, Communications strategy and useful case study as it demonauthor. tactics and Post planning. This prompts the strates the scale of the commitAs a retired planner and observation as to why such a basically simple ment necessary to make a real now a county councillor proposition as consulting the community impact in an evolving communimuch of my time is spent on ty as opposed to it being merely working with local commushould become so complex. a marketing exercise. nities living in a series of I suspect that this book with its wealth of experience and large estates now nearing completion in my division. These new residents are now my electorate as much as those who best practice will become a well leafed guide with many active in large scale development. have lived in the area for a long time. An important innovation is the chapter on consulting on a The chapter on community involvement following construction has some useful case studies of where developers nationally important infrastructure project. An application for have engaged both with the new and existing residents so as an NSIP must be accompanied by a consultation report in to shape the new community. There is a huge problem of accordance with Section 27 of the 2008 Planning Act and this resource and manpower capacity within both local govern- provides an extensive list of the activities that must be carried ment and the development industry to deal with the post – out as well as some case studies. n

BOOKS | ESTHER KURLAND

The Design Companion for Planning and Placemaking Co-author Esther Kurland answers the question: ‘What is the point of this book?’ We publish our review in the next issue

Back in 2012 Lord Taylor was given the unenvious task of reading through the 7,000 odd pages of national planning guidance and deciding what to keep and what to archive. When he and his team looked at By design, the companion design guide for PPS1, the decision as that it was well understood and so not needed any more. A slightly odd conclusion as many might think that because a guide was well understood, and presumably used if people were bothering to understand it, then it was worthy of life. But By Design, admittedly rather out of date by the star of this decade, was archived. At Urban Design London we organised an open workshop, for anyone interested, to decide how the gap left could and should be filled. The 30 odd experts who came along offered draft wording on design for the new National Planning Policy Guidance (PPG), most of which was eventually used on the Governments new planning National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and guidance website, launched in 2014. But there was much that could not go into the web, including examples, pictures, technical explanations etc. This is when the idea of writing a new book about design and planning was born. DCLG was not in a position to commission such a book, and the government had no appetite to welcome new formal national guidance. But this was the era of the Big Society (remember that) where people were expected to do things that used to be someone’s job, in their own time. So a group of people who felt that design was a very important part of planning, and needed up to date guidance spent the next 2 years creating the Design Companion for Planning and Placemaking, now published by RIBA. UDL did most of the work on the book, and compiled ideas and content from others, but the book, with ovr 30 people involved in its creation offers a consensus on the way design fits with planning. The Design Companion This is a practical book, with tips, things to consider and helpful nuggets of practical information. It references NPPF design policies and build on the wording provided in the PPG. The book is not intended to replace national or local guidance, but to supplement it, providing illustrations and further detail on what the PPG says. For planners, design is the thing that shapes the physical form of development. It is both a process and an outcome, and it influences the success of both planning as an activity and the quality and usefulness of places. Influencing design is an immensely complex matter. It involves the skills and actions of a wide range of people, economics and many levels of policy, guidance and process within both the public and private sectors. Design can be influenced by a wide range of strategies, delivery mechanisms, and systems of management and stewardship,

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operating from the short to the long term. Who is The Design Companion for ? This book aims to help people who are involved in planning – many of them early in their careers – to understand what design is; how it fits into the planning system; and what issues arise in relation to some specific topics. It aims to be a helpful mentor for people who are not design experts and a refresher for those with design experience. Planners often find themselves having to respond to unfamiliar situations. The Design Companion is intended to help them think about what issues may be relevant to a particular development proposal or policy project, and it introduces tools to help make the most of opportunities to achieve better places. It aims to help people understand and apply planning policy and guidance which relate to design issues. Successful planning results from creative responses to challenging contexts, not from standard solutions, and hopefully The Design Companion is a first step in that process.

What’s inside The Design Companion ? This book has two parts. The first, made up of seven chapters, covers the theory and principles of good design and how these relate to planning. The first three chapters explain the link between the form of places and development proposals, the qualities of successful places and wider public policy and political objectives. The next four chapters look at the people, processes and tools involved in planning, and how these >>>

Issue 103 October-December 2017

BOOKS | ESTHER KURLAND

! >>> relate to design. Good design is indivisible from good planning. That sentiment, included in national planning policy for many years, is at the heart of this part of the book. We explain how planning legislation, policies and processes influence how design is dealt with. We discuss who gets involved, when and how, and we explain the basic principles through which design and planning, together, can create good places that meet political objectives. Chapters in part one include: • What is design and how does it relate to planning? • The characteristics of well-designed places • Aspects of development form • Legislation, planning and decision-making • Who is involved • Processes related to design • Understanding plans and drawings Throughout the book reference is made to the NPPF, relevant extracts of which are highlighted in each chapter. Important points to consider are also provided to highlight the most important issues planners should consider in reviewing development proposals. Part two of The Design Companion picks up the concepts and principles covered in part one and applies them to ten topics that planners are likely to deal with day to day. Because each of the ten chapters in part two focus on what fundamental design principles mean for that topic, some things (such as active frontages and block layouts, for example) are touched on more

than once. Part two design specifics include; • Small-scale development • Housing • Landscape • Environmental issues • Historic environment • Streets • Public space • Tall buildings • Town centres and transport interchanges • Town extensions and large-scale schemes The most relevant section for highway engineers is the Street section whose lead author is John Dales, a director at Urban Movement. The section explains important concepts, terms and technical considerations that planners should be aware of when dealing with both the creation of new streets and alterations to existing ones. The section covers; how decisions about streets are made, important design considerations, what planners should consider when reviewing the movement aspects of development proposals and when they should get involved. After all streets provide two essential roles enabling movement and providing access to place-based activities and the quality of the design of our streets goes a long way to determine the quality of the place itself. Traditionally the remit of engineers, the design of streets is a highly important area for planners to get involved in, as streets have a major impact on the usability and success of places. As John notes in the book, designing streets should not be left to one professional discipline. Planners have a responsibility and remit to have a say in street design, and to help communities do the same. Hopefully the book will prove helpful to planners and placemakers across the country. n The Design Companion for Planning and Placemaking, RIBA Publications £30, is available from RIBA bookshops, RIBA website, Amazon and other on line bookshops.

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BOOKS FOR REVIEW

Waterfronts, public realm, human evolution, ornament and and crime These books are up for review by readers; just email your choice and your postal address to editor@planninginlondon.com and feel lucky!

An unprecedented homage to modernist architecture from the 1920s up to the present day Ornament Is Crime is a celebration and a thought-provoking reappraisal of modernist architecture. The book proposes that modernism need no longer be confined by traditional definitions, and can be seen in both the iconic works of the modernist canon by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, as well as in the work of some of the best contemporary architects of the twenty-first century. This book is a visual manifesto and a celebration of the most important architectural movement in modern history. Matt Gibberd and Albert Hill: Phaidon ÂŁ29.95

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Issue 103 October-December 2017

DIRECTORY DIRECTORY

Planning and Environment Reference Guide