It will be interesting to see what variant of steroided suburb Berkeley are cooking up. I’ll bet it makes no place for industry, nor for most of the rest of the vibrant (and fast growing) existing economic and civic life of Peckham.

Berkeley's proposals for the Old Kent Road area. The exhibitions took place on Wednesday 20 April from 2pm to 8pm at the Unwin and Friary Estate Tenants’ and Residents’ Hall, Frensham Street, Off Peckham Park Road SE15 and Thursday 21 April from 2pm to 8pm at the Links Community Centre, 353 Rotherhithe New Road, SE16 3HF.

Some words from Mark Brearley, owner of Kaymet (tray factory) and Professor of Spatial Planning and Urban Design at London Metropolitan University:

My business, and the neighbouring businesses, just meters away from Berkeley’s land, have not received emails nor leaflets, even though I get the impression that Southwark Council have shared contacts with Berkeley. I guess they don’t count the economy as community.

Regardless of what Berkeley are cooking up, their approach makes a mockery of the planning system, shows their contempt for it, their un-interest in democratic process and civil rights. They are openly sharing their ideas for a residential led development on protected industrial land, running way ahead of the local planning authority’s process to decide on what type of land-use / development scenario will be appropriate for the area in future. That process has so far not even managed to set out issues and options, nor to consult on and engage in a dialogue about them. There have been no opportunities to make comments nor lodge representations about possible changes to planning policy that are likely to have brutal consequences for businesses in the area. Yet we hear rumours that Berkeley want to put in a planning application before Christmas. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Meanwhile the local planning authority are conspicuously failing to embrace an understanding of the economic dynamic of their area. They seem to have no intention of meeting the requirement placed on them by government to ensure that the accommodation needs of the economy in their area are properly planned for. Development rights were expropriated by central government in 1947 (the same year my business started in this part of London) and then they were handed over to local authorities. Southwark Council seems to have forgotten that when expropriated assets were handed to them they came with a responsibility to manage them fairly and without prejudice, indeed that was the very reason why they were expropriated. Now they seem content to disregard the interests of business communities who have little voice and do not get to vote, who are taxed but not represented. The Council seem to think it's fine also to parade the possibility of property expropriation as a way to push through the suburb building plans that they clearly are already wedded to. Businesses have not been kept informed about the process that is ongoing, indeed most (such as mine) have so far received no communication on the matter. Yet the Council state that they will tell us all what their preferred option for the future of the Old Kent Road is in just a few days time! They too should be ashamed of themselves, and their friends in City Hall.

None of this is good.

I urge you all to speak up for a more diverse and accommodating Old Kent Road.

Mark

Kaymet

The Godiva chocolate factory, loading on the street alongside Simonis metro station, Koekelberg, in the city of miracle mix, Brussels.

Terrifying loss of accommodation from industrial areas in London

[adapted from an email chain from Professor Mark Brearley]

There is now substantial loss of accommodation ongoing from industrial areas in London, due to the permitted development liberalisation. Industrial areas are not immune to this strip-out.

The below are excerpts from The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015:

B1 offices

Class O – offices to dwellinghouses
Permitted development
O. Development consisting of a change of use of a building and any land within its curtilage from a use falling within Class B1(a) (offices) of the Schedule to the Use Classes Order, to a use falling within Class C3 (dwellinghouses) of that Schedule.

B8 storage

 Permitted development P. Development consisting of a change of use of a building and any land within its curtilage from a use falling within Class B8 (storage or distribution centre) of the Schedule to the Use Classes Order to a use falling within Class C3 (dwellinghouses) of that Schedule.

Most industrial buildings can be presented as B1(a) or B8 if an owner needs to (in order to, for example, get away with conversion to residential). I assume that very few industrial buildings in a city like London will have clear planning status, pinning them a particular one of those anyway-semi-meaningless B use classes. So it all blurs around, and the result is that most industrial accommodation, everywhere, is now triply at risk. At risk from Local Plans that fail to designate for policy protection, at risk from ad-hoc planning decisions that disregard policy, at risk from permitted development that goes around planning.

The image is of is an example, a building currently being converted to residential in one of the Old Kent Road industrial areas, I believe via permitted development. The same is happening in the nearby Parkhouse Street industrial area, against what even the gung-ho local planners would have allowed through planning application. The same is happening all over town, such as in the Lower Sydenham industrial area where a building, with a very unfortunate relationship to assorted fairly rough industrial uses such as a concrete batching plant, is turning residential.

Grim.

We are Londoners, we don’t want a suburbanised city.

Hackbridge industry is now nearly all evicted and the accommodation demolished. More housing estates coming soon. When Mark Brearley was at the GLA he tried valiantly to argue for a more subtle and mixed future, a more urban future, but to no avail... here's what's happening now:

What the hell is a Local Enterprise Partnership?

On Wednesday morning I found myself in the Caledodian Club at 8.30am, eating posh biscuits and feeling decidedly out of place in a sea of suits. I was at a seminar, organised by the Westminster Social Policy Forum thrillingly entitled Regeneration and local economic growth in England - innovation, investment and the future for LEPs.

I went to this because I'd wangled a free ticket, and someone on the Just Space Economy and Planning (JSEP) mailing list mentioned it may be interesting, but I had no idea what LEPs (Local Enterprise Partnerships) were. So, in case you are as ignorant as I, LEPs are partnerships between Local Authorities in England and business bodies, which exist for the purpose of promoting economic development. There are 39 of them, and a bit more information can be found here.

LEPs were set up when the Regional Development Agencies were 'burned to the ground' (in the words of one of the speakers) by the Tories in 2012. If you don't know what they were either, they were then non-departmental public bodies set up by Labour from 1998 to promote development - you can find out more here. Significant for me is the London Development Agency, which came into being in 2000 when the Greater London Authority was set up (and we elected Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London) which has now been replaced by the pan-London LEP, nattily entitled the London Enterprise Panel (acronym also LEP).

With a couple of small peeps of dissension, the speakers at the seminar mostly agreed that LEPs are a good idea, and that the private sector is a source of bounty for economic development. Several key themes emerged over the course of the morning:

1. Flexibility – LEPs are not well defined, so they have the potential to be anything
2. Purpose – what are LEPs for?
3. Accountability – what are LEPs up to? In whose interests?
4. Resources – who pays for it and how is this significant?

Resources

In 2012 LEPs were set up on a wholly voluntary basis, with no resources and the expectation that activities would be self-funded by local business and local authorities (LAs). The problems with this are obvious. First, LAs have suffered massive budget cuts, to the extent that because there is no statutory requirement for them to have departments responsible for economic development, many have disbanded them (and consequently lost their expertise) altogether. Second, the types local business which would have money and time available to contribute would only be the bigger ones, who are already more powerful and don't necessarily represent the interests of small local business, and certainly don't me necessarily represent the interests of local non-business people.

Recently, EU money (from the European Structural Investment Fund and the European Social Fund) has became available for LEPs to apply for, with present project funding of between €95 and €250 million per LEP. They have the freedom to pool money from different funds, but significantly it must be 50% match funded from the private sector. This requirement is reflected in the disinterest in the money available from the European Social Fund in for building social housing or retrofitting existing social housing as low-carbon. The returns are low, so because the private sector must be closely involved it is unlikely to happen through the mechanism of LEPs, even though money is available for it.

European law dictates what can and can't be done and the European Social Fund is particularly interested in employment, education and skills. LEPs get the money, they draw up strategies for spending it (although several speakers said that actually spending it is more complicated than it sounds) and ensure that the proposed outcomes happen. The EU prizes delivery and performance above all else, but the majority of LEPs have a permanent staff of under 10 people, so how this actually happens was the focus of much debate.

Keith Burgess from the Federation of small businesses summed it up nicely. Although there are resources from the EU, do the skills and capacity exist to manage these? The LEPs are composed of private interests and local authorities,, with few which include local communities in the development. The UK Government is keen on locally-led growth... but growth for its own sake seems pointless, for whose benefit?

Flexibility

Professor John Shutt suggested the engagement of LEPs, it is hugely advantageous for universities and FE to be key partners, because every LEP is different, all over the UK. Economic restructuring of the city, developing new institutional structures to deliver economic growth at a city-regional scale, which is not an easy task.

Alex Pratt: For the first time in living memory we are sitting down locally to consider local economic imperatives. It’s the first time we’ve got buy-in from local businesses. 50% of the LEPs are Local Authorities. All LEPS are different, but in general there is much more business engagement than there was with the Regional Development Agencies.

Alex Pratt: Delivery is the focus of LEPs, the LEP network was devised in order that 39 separate solutions don’t emerge to solve the same problem. It will not go away soon, LEPs are set in stone (although how soon is soon?). Competition should be between between the UK and the rest of the world, not within the UK.

Purpose

Baroness Valentine, Chief exec of London First, explained that the Pan-London LEP works closely with London First on the long term economic development of London, focussing on things like HS1 and HS2, the Northern Line Extension. Other cities can learn a lot from the way these have been developed. London needs to invest in transport and housing in order to maintain growth, we have a projected population of 10 million by 2036.

John Shutt echoed this: Place matters, powerful city-regions are important in the global context, cities need to federate with one another in order to be globally competitive. The LEPs need to understand local institutions and economic situation. Place-based issues include leadership and governance locally, institutional restructuring of the LEPs, analysis of assets networks and places with development potential (to do this at a fine enough grain to appreciate the nuances of particular streets requires huge resources – local authorities certainly don’t know this level of detail).

There are problems with overlapping boundaries and places which lie on boundaries in terms of delivery, there needs to be policy in place to drive co-operation between LEPs rather than competition between the regions. London is particularly good at this, elsewhere is less so. Some places are combined authorities, others are not and it is a complex, evolving and contradictory process. Margaret Hodge in her report on the LEPs argued that not much of the money was actually reaching businesses.

Carol Sweetnam gave a run-down of I was particularly interested in Community led local developments, although I had great difficulty finding out about his on the internet afterwards – mentioned an orchard which apparently had regenerated an area, created jobs, community cohesion and all sorts of other things. THANK GOD FOR ORCHARDS.

Alex Pratt was an excellent speaker, very engaging and spoke without slides which was a nice change. In the UK in the length of a lifetime we have gone from being the richest and most powerful country on the planet to on which is £1.5 trillion in debt, with a series of crises on our hands – housing, obesity… what’s happened to us? Part of the problem is centralised economic decision making, and when things are centralised you get sub-optimal outcomes. There has been no strategic influence on the factors which influence production locally. We seem to have all agree that the private sector is the source of all things good. The problem is that the balance is wrong between the short term political priorities and the medium to long term economic priorities. The LEPs will possibly be a step along the way towards solving this, some by choice, some co-erced. We run a nationalised system, eg. skills are nationalised, the national system is ‘dug-in’, and the LEPs have less support than we might like to see ideally. Councillors sometimes see LEPs as a ‘slap in the face’

Accountability

Professor John Shutt established a core theme when he argued that they organisation around governance, resources and funding has not yet been established. John Shutt raised the question of governance, and noted that resources are required for LEPs to be accountable to everyone else in what they do, and as yet we do not know where the money for this comes from.

Keith Burgess from the Institute of Economic Development said The RDA valuation reports were going to be scrapped, and the Institute of Economic Development has saved them for the LEPs to use. LEPs are intended to be bottom-up. LEPs, what are they going to do and why?

Paul Watson from the FSB: Between 2008-11 95% of people who found a job found a job within a small business or set up a small business. Jobs in small business are jobs, and are also important for social inclusion, they often employ those who find it difficult o find jobs elsewhere. Local Authorities need to be empowered, and small businesses lack trust for Local Authorities. They suspect that LEP money will be used as an easy means of plugging deficits, and they have a poor record when it comes to ameliorating town centre decline. They see consultation as ‘tickbox’, and that LAs don’t take the time to engage in genuine consultation (I have observed exactly this in Haringey). LEPs need transparency, accounts, minutes, members’ interests – otherwise people don’t know what’s going on. FSB could find only 50% with published information. Governance of LEPs should be accountable to SMEs, which are a blind spot for a lot of LEPs. They need to ensure against ‘mission drift’ in which they drift towards becoming mini RDAs. LEPs should be about business support, ensuring local procurement for LAa. Business rstes reforms incentives (Enterprise Areas) are not working.

Comments

The problem here seems to be between the scale of the LEP, and the scale of a large proportion of the economic life in an area, which is SMEs. I wondered if there is any mechanism in place to help very small businesses, and those which belong to non-native speakers or those with a lower level of formal education. All in all, it seems there are 39 bodies throughout England who have the potential to bridge the gap between vast institutions which may be a source of money, and the individual business person who lives and works in Tottenham. But there are 59 million people in England. Divided into 39 LEPs that's 1.5 million people each. That's a lot of people for a small, voluntary, business-led organisation to be of much use. Which is probably why I've never heard of LEPs before.

The Big Meet: Addressing the National Place Leadership Gap

Last Thursday (17th July) I spent several exceedingly hot and sweaty hours in a big tent in the quad at UCL discussing the findings of the Farrell Review of Architecture and the Built Environment, "Our Future in Place". The conversation was focussed on two key questiones posed in the Farrell Review: Do we need a 'Place Alliance'? and would 'National Place Leadership' be beneficial?

To see tweets from the event search for the hashtag #bigmeet. There are some good ones, and there were some very interesting conversations on Twitter relating to conversations in the room. The findings will also be published later as part of the Evaluating the Governance of Design UCL research project.

"As a follow-up to the Farrell Review, The Bartlett School of Planning is holding a high level ‘Big Meet’ of cross-sector organisations with an interest in place design at UCL’s Bloomsbury campus on Thursday 17th July.

Drawing on current AHRC funded UCL research into questions of design governance and Professor Matthew Carmona’s recently published suggestions for how to build on the place leadership recommendations of the Farrell Review, the Big Meet will take forward this aspect of the review and seek to formulate a common manifesto or set of principles for advancing this agenda at the national level. The Big Meet will be followed by a meeting with the Minister for Culture, Ed Vaizy MP."

We were organised around tables of 8-12 people, arranged rather like we were at a giant wedding (the white marquee added to this effect). To promote discussion, Carmona had authored a short discussion paper, entitled 'National place leadership: three steps to filling the gap in England' suggesting a route to promoting the importance of place in the husbandry of our built environment. First, the 'Big Meet' with cross-sector discussion about the desirability and viability of a politically sanctioned emphasis on place. Second, the formation of a Place Alliance to bring together 'key players' to speak with one voice for the built environment. Third, the establishment of a cross party, politically independent Place Council for England led jointly by government and industry with its own non-governmental funding and objectives. This would be something a bit like a more independent version of government-funded CABE (which existed between 1999 and 2011, and UCL research suggests did a good job at improving the built environment, but didn't make many friends in the process).


What is the Farrell Review?

The Farrell Review, predominantly funded by Farrells, and commissioned by the Dept. for Culture, Media and Sport, examines the way the built environment is planned and designed, across agencies and stakeholders. It then makes recommendations for ways this could be improved. Primarily, it concludes that "...the built environment is extremely complex and that this complexity must be recognised within all our education systems, within the broadest professional life and within government at all levels." Astutely, the report recognises that what brings together this complexity into one arena is place - which is a combination of topography (buildings and streets) and society (people, their lives and interrelationships) as well as invisible institutional, legal and administrative structures tied to specific locations.

The heat is not apparent in this picture. It was, however, very hot.

Towards a Place Alliance

It was generally agreed that a Place Alliance (PA) has the potential to  advocate for places, above the competing interests of organisations and institutions who have a stake in them (ie. everyone). In terms of what the Place Alliance might actually do, this was as far as consensus was reached. How and where this advocacy ought to occur, by whom (are members of the PA invited, appointed or voluntary?) to whom (the public, government, industry?) and how the outcomes should be measured (in money, in 'well-being', in participation?) and then enshrined in what kind of policy (planning? economic? how do we control what developers build?) all remained up for grabs. This seems to be a taster for what is to come in such an organisation - the prospect of getting so many competing interests to speak with 'one voice' seems nigh on impossible, and also undesirable. It seems to me that rather than discussing the administration of such an organisation we would be better to begin with ethical questions, such as those asked at the London For All afternoon by Rachel Laurence of the NEF: what are places - who and what do they serve.

In the Review, as well as place being an ordinary word, place is also converted into an acronym: Planning, Landscape, Architecture, Conservation, Engineering, as the outline structure of a 'method', or a toolkit, for understanding and dealing with place. Alternatively, encompassing the 'concept' of place, the acronym Politics, Life, Advocacy, Community, Environment is suggested. As pointed out by Matthew Carmona, the possibilities for acronyms are almost endless: Particular, Location, Area, Conversations, Economy to name just one example. I fundamentally disagree with the abstraction of the word 'place'  because in its deepest essence, a place is not a concept. A place a concrete thing, rather than an abstraction, within which concepts can be accommodated, but which are always specifically connected to a particular location and geography. To frame it as such means the conversations around it get conceptual and abstract, rather than concrete and specific. This was a problem with much of the discussion, from which places themselves were wholly absent.

National place leadership

Introducing the second session, Carmona made some excellent points about the lack of collaboration at present in the highly fragmented built environment 'sector' (I would argue that it is not a 'sector', it is the underlying foundations of everything - in a very real way -  but let's put that aside for the moment and proceed with the jargon). He argued that the fetishisation of design, the tyranny of the market vs. regulation the NIMBYs and the BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone - I love it) compete in an unfruitful way, to the detriment of actual places. Rather like the first session, the second was dominated by questions of governance, funding etc. and studiously avoided questions of what the purpose and approach of the Place Council for England could actually be.

Comments

According to Farrel in his opening address, the Review seeks cultural change, focussed on well-being as an indicator of success. This is an oft-repeated trope and fails to address the key finding of the review: that places are complex, while 'well-being' is so simple as to be almost meaningless. The complexity of places is so deep that it seems rather grandiose to suggest that they can be managed and advocated through a single council. It also promotes the spectre of some kind of pattern book for good places, divorced form the real-life negotiation of civic conflict.

A successful urban structure of adaptability is the cause, not the symptom, of an apparently 'good' place. This is not something which can be achieved through aesthetically-focused design. Instead, it is the capability of the urban structure to moderate and organise the inevitable competition between the different interests of groups and individuals in civic society. It is tempting (as occurred at London for All) to focus on civic questions solely on the economy - particularly at the small scale. But urban structure is also composed of other kinds of institutions which contribute to the negotiation of conflict. The civic city depends on the people, their relationships with each other (embedded in place), sometimes more than on the organisations, particularly the global-scale organisations who are frequently those with the biggest financial stake in the creation or improvement of place.

The initial purpose of the Place Alliance should therefore be to establish an agreed ethical basis which would guide the activities of the Place Council for England, so it does not become the flagship for the present leader's personal aesthetic or BANANA based whims. Measuring the non-economic value of places is difficult or impossible, so success should focus on the extent to which a place enables the participation and commitment-to-place of the people who inhabit it. In order to do this, I propose that the organisation should be embedded in a network of actual places - in the dirt, the bin-collections, the piss on the street and the physically located conflict between councils, churches, clubs, SMEs and internaional corporations.