Profound social impact
Moreover, there are strong social impacts to positive growth, with regeneration offering a way to improve people’s lives and in so doing contribute to London’s and the UK’s productivity and wellbeing.
Today over 62% of households in Barking & Dagenham have at least one measure of deprivation, the highest in England and Wales, and we have real challenges around people’s health with high rates of obesity and low healthy life expectancies. It is fairly sobering that in the time you have travelled on the District line from Richmond in West London to Barking in East London, men’s healthy life expectancy has dropped by 14 years. But it is also a Borough undergoing significant change. It bucks national trends with a growing younger under 15 population (+17.3% in LBBD compared to +5% in England), significantly growing working age 15 - 64 population (+20.8% in LBBD compared to +3.6% in England) and a contracting 65+ population (-1.7% compared to +20.1% in England). There is a steady increase in the proportion of students achieving 2x A levels, with this now exceeding the London average, and an increasing proportion of the Borough’s households have a household income of £50k+ (17.8% in 2018 growing to 35.6% in 2023).
Delivering the right homes in the right places, supported by the right infrastructure, is an opportunity to meet the needs of local people and businesses, setting the path towards a higher quality of life, and better quality jobs alongside new homes.
A bright future
Policy by itself is not going to unlock development, and certainly not at sufficient scale. We have a bang up to date planning policy framework. Our Local Plan was adopted last Autumn, and we will be taking our Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) for Thames Road- one of our key transformation areas- to the respective Council committees for adoption in the Spring.
I recently became Interim Managing Director for Be First, and with it took on responsibility for expediting Be First phase II. Our original business model no longer works at the same scale that it did for Be First phase I. Similarly, the sheer scale of what is possible in Barking and Dagenham means that it is not realistic for the Council to deliver it all. We need to work with partners. We need public private partnerships and lots of them. We need to sensibly focus what we all know is a limited public purse to those locations with the most return, unlocking private capital.
It is something of a pivotal time. There is a lot of work underway at all levels of government to fix and improve current challenges, and to deliver on the growth agenda in such a way that benefits our communities.
The win in Barking & Dagenham is seriously significant.
With a pro-growth agenda and a track record for delivery, the Council is well-equipped to continue driving this transformation via Be First. We have identified key growth sectors for the Borough, drawing on its strengths and opportunities and aligning these with GLA and central Government priorities, ensuring a cohesive approach to development.
We are working with MHCLG on a proposal to be considered in the Spending Review, aiming to overcome current macroeconomic conditions and investment market uncertainty to unlock further phases of Thames Road.
We are proposing designating South Barking as a Growth Delivery Zone, with special measures to overcome development challenges and unlock private investment. This will facilitate delivery within the current parliamentary period and beyond, across several economic cycles.
House prices and rental growth forecasts are encouraging. Zoopla’s figures showed increases of 10% for Barking & Dagenham over the last year, compared to, at best, stagnation in inner London. And while we start from a comparatively low base, this nevertheless makes the Borough an attractive investment proposition.
There is immense opportunity here to ‘crowd in’ public and private investment, backed by the necessary ingredients for success in the short, medium, and long term. We are here for it- are you?