Hi Katrina. Can I quiz you on some of the top-line thoughts you've had from your three and a half years as chair of the NLA’s expert panel on work? Obviously, it's very difficult to digest it all. But what's at the front and centre of your brain when you come to look at what you've learned from the panel members? What have been the surprising aspects to you?

 

Hi! I look at things from a global perspective, and I think that initially we were getting very much in the weeds about London, and we weren't stepping back to say that London actually is an amazing city and a vibrant city. We need to regain that sort of position on the world stage. My perspective is that I can go into micro topics, but really, I'm interested in the macro topic that it's got some amazing things going for it. You know, we are ahead of the game in innovation, and we care about people. We have mixed use communities; we're striving for more. We bash our planning system, but we have one! We have a government that functions – I'm sitting here in New York, and we don't, here. 

I've been fortunate enough, I guess, that my whole career has been very much global based. I think that people are in awe of London and want to come to London. And sometimes we get too much in the negativity; we don't actually see what's in front of us. We've got a beautiful city; we've got a walking city; a caring city. So that's one topic. 

The second one is really that obviously is on commercial offices. I’ve come from an architecture design background, but my whole cycle has been about the occupier and how people use the built environment. And I think that's mushroomed. So, the title ‘work’ that originally was probably manifested in commercial offices is actually that, now, the world of work is everywhere, and it can be everywhere. And so, I guess the question that begs is: how do we actually keep a building stock still available? Because at the end of the day, the bricks and mortar performs a lot of other things. So, they do perform as assets that pensions buy that then feed our individual pensions. They feed, good or bad, the banks and the asset managers and the investors and the confidence in the market to build this bricks and mortar. So, while on the one hand, the world of work has changed, and you could work anywhere, do we need these buildings, these edifices? On the other hand we actually do, because they do result in providing money to the financial centre and the insurance sector and all the other things that feed then our own individual. So, I think there's something interesting in that, almost a push and pull about that topic. 

And then, of course, work is about the people. And so, the third topic is very much around the problem we have that we're not necessarily building the right product in the right place for the right people, as I would summarize it. Land is bought by a developer who wants to develop it and get the most return for its shareholders on that site, that plot. But I think we have to be more cognizant of the fact that we all feel that we want to put in social aspects or all these amenities or give backs to the communities. But I don't think they're working together enough to say, “Okay, if 10% of the site has to be affordable housing, or 10% has to be a social community centre, 10% has to be Section 106”; everybody's working for themselves. There's not really a communal discussion. If you've got five office buildings in one borough close by, what does that borough really need and want? Just because you think it should be x, maybe it's not ‘x’ or maybe clubbed together with these other five buildings, one does one, one does one, one does another. You know, so I'm interested in that again sharing of the knowledge of the requirement, or to give back place. And then the subset to that - I think we didn't have as many representations of the boroughs as we should have had. So, at one point, we had someone from Southwark, and one of the other boroughs represented, and their view is very, very different. Obviously, their dealings are totally different – class; budget; need. And probably that was the one area that was lacking consistently in our three years, to what does the borough really need. And also, the planning – we did have some good input on the planning system and the planning thoughts, but not consistently, across each of the three years. We talked a lot in the last cycle about affordable housing, and the need for social housing and the need for affordable housing – and then what is affordable…?

 

Really? Within the parameters of work?

 

Yeah, absolutely. It was really because the work can be done anywhere. So, if you're talking about working remotely at home, what does that actually look like in your home? And so, for us, the affordable housing piece became really interesting as a subset to where people work. And I don't think that has been given enough consideration in our topics. So that's where we sort of broke down the last year to be around. So I divided the group into two parts. One was around people, and one was around planet. So, we had very much around three initiatives for the people. And so that's what you'll see there is that the first initiative is around the workplace being a destination. And I'm not talking about the desk on the floor; I'm talking about getting to the building, permeable ground floors, you know, what should the ground floor be, what should be opened up was this in between spaces between buildings that people could occupy? What's the whole experience of that coming to work?

The second one was really about just being the human experience, and how scale is really important. We're trying to build up to get more volume. But that has its own problems as well about, you know, living up – how many people really want to live in a tower that you can't get out of, or you have no outdoor space, or there's no sense of community, or it's all the same? So that was really a question mark as to how we can get human again. 

And then the third aspect was – and this is where it touches on everything, because we can't really do the work in the city and build the city if the transport is expensive and takes so long. And this is the dichotomy of the third space, and then the hub and spoke, and do you separate that out? But ultimately, I believe that people do you want to come back to a vibrant city, and for all the reasons of, you know, before work or after work, that they're doing social, going to the theatre, meeting friends, whatever it is. So, I think that has to play a part into what the buildings are, in terms of the mixed-use element. 

We design buildings to very extreme standards. And I was president of the BCO in 2018/19 and launched the BCO guide. So, we're familiar with the technical aspect. We're familiar with what we say, very familiar that it's a really good guide to add value and asset, the building. At the end of the day, we design, maybe over-design, for 24/7. When in fact, maybe we should be thinking differently: that the seven days a week is, or six days, if you count one day the rest day - why aren't we thinking about our buildings being split off? The company has it three days a week, another company has it three days a week, or we can change the monitoring of the engineering, so that we can expand the 24-hour day. You know, we don't need nine to five anymore. So, I think there's a whole question mark over the specification of buildings. And the thinking out the box, of how we can use this product, this bricks and mortar that we have. 

The fifth one was about the affordable workspace. And I'm not just talking about housing, I'm talking about working space. So, we talked about co-working - developers are doing a lot of that now; occupiers are demanding it in terms of extra spill-over space. We haven't really touched on the small SMUs, you know, the single person that wants to start up and then where do they go? And how do they grow? And what's affordable? Because, very quickly those things become too expensive. You know, so okay, cool and trendy to have a warren. But when you suddenly have 10 people, what do you have to do? You can't really afford that kind of environment. 

And then the last one, the sixth one, was a pet issue, if you like. I think most people in our world is, is about retrofit versus new build. And that's a very hot topic. I have two views. One, I think you absolutely should try to reuse and maintain what's there in the first instance, but I also believe that commercial grade office space is lacking in the city. And therefore, to force somebody to keep a building with low ceiling heights, tiny windows, massive columns, not contiguous floor levels, etc, etc. just for the sake of an external facade that’s not even listed but sounds good maybe is not the right solution if we can prove that operational carbon is also a bad thing, too. So, there's a whole discussion around that. But that was kind of where we ended up on the planet side of things.

 

Taking all of your discussions over the last three years or so, have you built up a vision for how London, particularly, will develop in the next five to 10 years in the world of work? And if you have, can you encapsulate that in a paragraph or two? I know that's a very tricky proposition, but what will we likely see? Three-day weeks being the norm? Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday – with people commuting more? Is there going to be a geographical focus on areas - will the City diversify further? That sort of thing.

 

I think everyone right now believes that the three-day week: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, will survive. I'm more sceptical because people's memories are short. We said we would never get back into tall buildings after 9/11, and here we are in tall buildings again. So quite frankly, I think no. I think that there will always be the type of work that is very process-driven, is very rota driven, that could be done remotely, absolutely. But the fact with AI coming on board, all those kinds of jobs, for the most part, could be done by AI or somewhere else. I think that the thought leadership and the actual human experience will mean that we'll probably be back in the office more often. If you look at the way that five days a week was always deemed to be full time but actually, we know that it's technically about 85% occupancy ever is full time just because of holidays and sick leave and people out. And so, you can almost argue that four days were naturally happening anyway. People just didn't kind of clock it at the time. So, my view is that it probably will settle back at around 80%. And I'm a believer that we should spread it out across the week. I think we have an obligation to the people that work in a coffee shop or work in the restaurant or newsagent to actually spread ouselves. So, my team, I require half of them to be on Monday in half to be in on Friday and the other two days they can choose just because I want coverage for my clients, I want people to use the building and want people to be to see us. I want people to be part of the environment and the fabric of the city. So that's my personal view, and that's how I run my business. I think we have to have a bit more guidance on it, but probably my view is that it'll go to four days a week.

 

And lastly, do you think there'll be international differences in this return to work? And if you do, do you think some nations will be quicker to return to this gregarious, “we all want to be together” idea, than others?

 

I have a slide I can send you on the world that I've already clocked, and basically, you can draw it from London, between London and the US is still talking about return to the office and worrying about it and the US is not back and I'm sitting in an empty office here with 200 people, and probably there’s 10. Okay, it's a Friday, but they're not back in the US, typically. You can clock certain cities by politics, unfortunately. But if you take London, then going to Europe and East, everyone's back. This subject doesn't even come up in conversation anymore. It's like old news. It's like, what are you talking about? Why do we care? Just get on with it. So, they are all back. You know, Europe is heading four days a week so from Paris and other places. Asia doesn't even talk about this stuff. It's full time. So, we in London and the US are probably the last people still to talk about it. 

 

Why is that? 

 

I don't know why the UK still worries about it so much, to be honest with you. I think there’s a reticence culturally around the UK to…I mean, we're very good standing in queues, for example, we follow the line. We don't put our head above the parapet. So, I think to some extent we're just sheep – I don't mean that negatively. But I have seen in America that there's a very big shift, which is not the British view. The British view, although we talk about individually what we want, I think we still are collectively, you know, the United Kingdom, give or take politics. The US is incredibly different. It's incredibly individualistic. It's incredibly me, me, me. And I think it steps on the Second Amendment; you know, my home is my castle, this is what I want to do for me. So, I think everyone is still here thinking about ‘me’ – themselves, and not the corporate or not the company that they work for. It's very different, very different.

 

Well, that was fascinating! Thank you so much. 

 

I don’t know if I answered your questions but there’s a lot of topics! 

 

You did! Thank you!

 

You’re certainly welcome! Bye!