London’s built environment professions must ‘reset’ their relationship with mayor Sadiq Khan and lobby hard over issues including the need to invest in healthy streets, create a new institute for post-Grenfell building research, investigate the creation of a London ‘bond’, and ‘flip’ VAT rules to boost retrofit in the capital. That was according to NLA’s expert panel chairs in a special meeting last week aimed at bringing forward ideas for change and to help shape NLA’s New London Agenda.

‘The mayor has 50 design advocates, we have 20,000’, said curator-in-chief and session chair Peter Murray as he kicked off the meeting to gauge the views and needs of NLA’s expert panels, covering every sector from public realm to transport. ‘This has got to be the moment that the mayor tries for a political reset with the relationship with London’ said Jonny Popper, Managing Director, London Communications Agency, Chair of the NLA Expert Panel on Planning. ‘What we don’t know is: will there be any level of department reshuffling?’, he added, pointing to the levelling up department, for instance. ‘But it is all to play for. It is possible for there to be a bit more of a reset’.

Ashley Bateson, Partner, Hoare Lea, Chair of the NLA Expert Panel on Net Zero said that for London to be powerful, mobility is important. ‘Every successful city needs to know that people need to move around effectively’, he said, without ‘political pride’ getting in the way. The key opportunity was around retrofit at large scale, he added, perhaps with programmes of ‘positive intervention’ to enable that, particularly on residential schemes. ‘But the missed opportunity is energy efficiency’.

Robert Evans, Joint Managing Partner, Argent, Chair of the New London Sounding Board, said any ‘reset’ should be about the built environment sector’s relationship with the mayor. ‘The truth is, the mayor hasn’t got one’, he said. ‘The mayor does not meet our sector; he has no interest in our sector, other than bashing it in campaigning mode, which he hasn’t broken out of’. Instead, there needs to be a grown-up relationship between the sectors, the boroughs and City Hall, Evans believes. ‘We’re all going to have to work with each other better to reposition London’.

London attracts capital, but it has always been any capital – was there an opportunity to attract it differently; less in terms of one piece of real estate and more in terms of investing in London as an entity, Evans asked, perhaps through a London bond. That way it could be invested in ‘London plc’, but regional difficulties might be avoided by thinking more of networks and collaborations of mutually reinforcing cities.

Camilla Siggaard Andersen, Urban Research Lead, Hassell, Chair of the NLA Expert Panel on Built Environment Technology believed that we need to know what we value before thinking of how we use data. But there was ‘a massive missed opportunity’ in reshaping the built environment to tackle some of the political issues on the mayor’s agenda, such as helping to reduce crime.

For Hazel Rounding, Director, shedkm, Chair of the NLA Expert Panel on Public Realm, comfort in the use of the built environment was key here. Buildings are subject to analysis and data on cold or daylight, for example, but there is no real analysis on the ‘glue’ that knits the city together. How do we design the spaces between buildings to design for comfort? ‘There has to be a change in the public private investment in public realm’.

Bruce McVean, Acting Assistant Director for City Transportation, City of London, Chair of the NLA Expert Panel on Transport said more money needed to be invested in healthy streets and public spaces. But as people work more from home will there be more of a polycentric city? Big infrastructure projects do not help with that, where buses, active travel and multi-modal forms do. But the key issue is reducing motor traffic, said McVean, in outer as well as central London. However, will any London mayor commit to London-wide road user charging? It seems unlikely.

James Mitchell, Partner, Axiom Architects, Chair of the NLA Expert Panel on Retail & Hospitality reminded the group that it is predicted that there will be 300 million square foot of vacant retail space, so there should be a focus on high streets, with ‘democratized’ ground floors and a better community offer, perhaps incentivised through business rates.

For Jo McCafferty, Director, Levitt Bernstein, Chair of the NLA Expert Panel on Housing, housing is a major part of the picture when looking to make London a liveable city. The ballot process could be made more meaningful and accessible, especially to young people, and there is a ‘huge opportunity’ to involve young people in the design process, she said. ‘There are a multitude of benefits that spring from that in terms of training, apprenticeships and coming into the built environment as an industry’, she said. ‘Surely the mayor can sit behind that’. 

Quality needs to be invested in, in order to set London apart as an exemplar, especially in post-pandemic new housing, through adhering to new standards or altering funding structures to get the GLA to incentivise an upper tier of design quality. Retrofit, meanwhile, needs to be taken out of the ‘too difficult’ box more fully, she added.

Perhaps, as in other countries, it should be made compulsory for people who own homes to actually live in them, said Ben Marston, Director, Jestico + Whiles, Chair of the NLA Expert Panel on Education. But in terms of education the main principle concerns access – facilities need to be brought closer to communities, particularly on reskilling people in adult education to prepare them for the ‘new’ economy. Affordable student housing is another major issue that often presents a barrier, while skills and recruitment into education is another, with creative subjects, especially, not prioritised by the current administration. Elsewhere, Marston suggested, VAT, should be ‘flipped’ so that it applies to new build, with zero rate on retrofit in certain sectors. ‘Radical things need to happen’.

Tall buildings have become ‘toxic’, said Stuart Baillie, Partner, Head of Planning, Knight Frank, Chair of the NLA Expert Panel on Tall Buildings, with challenges from planning and politics. It was worth looking at how such buildings contribute to wider benefits such as the public realm, housing or education, said Baillie, especially in terms of exemplar projects. Tall buildings should also be looked at more through the lens of sustainability, too, but the speed of planning and its uncertainty is ‘scaring off’ developers, Baillie added. 

For Tom Alexander, Director, Aukett Swanke, Chair of the NLA Expert Panel on Industrial & Logistics, the integration or ‘blending’ of industrial into residential neighbourhoods was key, even if it ‘has always been tricky’. One of the best ways around this is to open up what is happening inside such schemes, Alexander believes. The demand for logistics has been intensified by Covid, so large companies are looking for last-mile delivery spaces, which can be mixed with other uses like recreational facilities or life sciences, for example, to create a better contributions to communities. The perception of this to London’s leaders is critical, as is the environmental responsibility of these big volume spaces, away from the LS Lowry image of pollution being pumped into the air. ‘The message is that they are a bit more friendly than you might believe’, said Alexander. A strategic review of how we move goods in and out of the city is required, he added.

Anisha Mayor, Director, UK Head of Healthcare, starting Chair of the NLA Expert Panel on Healthcare, said the GLA should demonstrate the decarbonisation of schemes across sites on estates, but key worker housing ‘has never really worked’ and needed more of a joined-up approach from City Hall. Health on the high street was another issue, with the need to devolve space into local communities, backed by GLA policy.

Arita Morris, Director, Child Graddon Lewis, Chair of the NLA Expert Panel on Technical Competency, said that the mayor taking notice of the built environment sector will likely come from the final report and inquiry over Grenfell, and with the building safety act likely to ‘transform the way we process design’. ‘We’re at a fairly important step in London’s history’, she said, with the legacy for London from Grenfell set to be of equal importance to disasters further back in time. Skills, capability and digital transformation will be how we move forward, with all of the strands of making a building safe and sustainable in need of being pulled together. ‘If ever there was a legacy for London, I would think it would be a centre for excellence for building innovation’, she said. 

Bateson said that while retrofit at scale was key, the financing model for regional government was also important – Hamburg is an example of where local taxation paid for its opera house. That kind of principle could accelerate planning, with planning departments so strapped for resources, he added.

Other ideas included from looking at how we get more from spending less, reducing siloes, but, as Jaffer Muljiani, Sustainability Consultant, BDP, Chair of the NLA NextGen Sounding Board noted from his panel’s discussions, everything came down to two things: considering the climate emergency and social equity.

Finally, Evans had some big picture thoughts on collaboration and the quest for net zero: ‘Bringing all of these things together, I’m always of the view that there is enough money; it’s how you use it and link it together. There are big projects coming in London; they are all going to want to be net zero. They’re all going to be looking for ways to make themselves net zero and I’m concerned are going to start spending money on inefficient choices to show that their individual projects are net zero.’

The most efficient way to do that would be invest in other people’s stock, although they will be naturally worried about linking with other people’s projects, Evans added.

 ‘But actually, that could be the most efficient way of getting retrofit into what we’re talking about...We could, as a city, be finding more efficient solutions, linking the money and the right investment, and we’re not doing that.’