Appendix 1

London Assembly Planning and Regeneration Committee - Wednesday 3 March 2021

Transcript of Agenda Item 6 – End-of-term Review: High Streets and Tall Buildings

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): That brings us to our main item of business, an end-of-term review focusing on high streets and tall buildings in London. Can I first launch this set of questions to Jules Pipe [CBE]? What would be the impact of the pandemic on different types of high streets in London?

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Good morning. It is probably obvious to say that all high streets and town centres have seen reductions in trade and footfall during the pandemic, but it is important to note that it does vary across type and geography. This has also shifted markedly at different stages of the pandemic, depending on different restrictions in movement and closure of premises as the COVID-19 restrictions have changed.

What seems to have happened is that footfall has significantly reduced in the international centres, the West End and Knightsbridge being the obvious examples. The number of people using stations in that area is down by as much as 86%. In most areas of London, common grocery-shopping trips have fallen by around 10% to 15%. Areas that are more focused on leisure retail and recreation trips are down by more than 50%. Of course, a lot of this is driven by the fall in travel to workplaces. All that incidental shopping that takes place as part of going to work. Travel to workplaces is down by 50% to 70% across London depending on the location.

The Greater London Authority (GLA) is doing a lot of work with boroughs, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and other partners to get greater data on this. It has formed a High Streets Data Partnership and that is all about pooling information, analysis and resources so that we get a more joined-up picture of what is going on as things develop and open up again. The key data feeding that Partnership are things like mobility data from Google and footfall data from O2 - when people are using their mobile phones, that anonymised data is all being fed in - and also spend data from MasterCard. Those are three of the principal data sources giving us a complex picture of people’s movement across London. All that will be analysed and we will have a health check on our town centres. That will be a central part of the work of the Partnership.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): I understand this work is ongoing, but can you already detect a difference between inner London high streets and outer London high streets?

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): It is anecdotal at the moment, but that will come through as people are doing more of their grocery shopping locally. Some of that has changed - some things will go up; some things will go down - and we are seeing the net effect. We have to get behind it to see what is going on. Some people who have made trips out in the past to a certain destination - maybe a large supermarket - will perhaps be doing some of their shopping locally in corner shops, and at the same time buying online and getting deliveries made. There is a net effect that we need to get behind to work out quite what the gross factors are that sit behind these movements.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): I do agree with you that so far people’s impressions are anecdotal and certainly, of the people I have talked to around London, those who are involved in outer London high streets have reported to me a bit of a boom in terms of those high streets. Again, we need to wait for the data. Have you any idea when the data might come online and be able to inform the debate about recovery?

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): It is pretty imminent. It is within the next few months.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): That is good. If I may move on to Michael Bach, thinking about the new Use Class E and the proposed permitted development rights (PDR) for this use class, what impact could this have on the high streets?

Michael Bach (Chair, Planning and Transport Committee, London Forum of Amenity & Civic Societies): Shall I introduce myself? I am from the London Forum of Amenity & Civic Societies, which is an umbrella group for about 120 civic societies across London. I should say that in a previous life I wrote national policy for town centres and retail.

We are very worried about the [likely] impact of the [proposed] PDR. The E use class introduced back in September [2020] introduced the possibility of flexibility between uses, which had some good points and not- so-good points because, at the end of the day, it is entirely down to the market, which of those uses survive. The new proposal is that, basically, any of those uses can turn into housing. The other thing, which is kind of hidden away, will be the loss of any previous exemptions that we had, particularly for offices. It is very worrying that all the balls have been thrown up in the air and any previous help is now back to square one. In fact, the use of Article 4 directions is going to be highly limited. That is one of the proposals for the changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).

I should say that the Forum is strongly in favour of the London Plan policies for town centres. It is exemplary. It fills the gap, which is not provided by the NPPF, and it relates to London.

In terms of whom it is going to affect, it is going to affect all our centres but particularly local centres. Probably that is not part of your brief but that is where things could start collapsing. They are extremely vulnerable to change of use because the ground-floor shops could easily be turned into flats in a way that, in major centres, is less likely to happen either because of property ownership or the scale of the units. It is going to undermine our concerns about local communities and whether neighbourhoods will have the facilities they need in the future. A successful PDR policy could spell the death of those local centres. It is a really worrying thing.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): Do you, however, in principle, welcome the flexibility to change between different high street uses under Class E, if it were not for the increase in PDR?

Michael Bach (Chair, Planning and Transport Committee, London Forum of Amenity & Civic Societies): As I said, it introduces a degree of flexibility, some of which is very good. For example, it embraces things like doctors’ surgeries, creches and daycentres as uses that you could turn into. The only problem with it is that they probably cannot compete, apart from in local centres. They are not going to compete in the main high streets.

One has to be careful. One can already see from previous relaxations that the primary retail pitches in town centres are being taken over by coffee shops. Coffee shops are not the big draw. They serve whoever is there. If you want to have a centre that attracts people from a wider catchment, it is not a coffee shop that is going to do it. It is going to be the retail and leisure offer that is available.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): If these PDRs do go ahead from Class E to residential, are there any modifications, in your view, that would mitigate the impact? For example, should conservation areas be exempt, or perhaps the rights should only apply above the ground floor, those kinds of things?

Michael Bach (Chair, Planning and Transport Committee, London Forum of Amenity & Civic Societies): Certainly, conservation areas have been excluded from a lot of other PDR rights, but here it is extremely limited. It is just a question of whether it has a nice shopfront, if you like, and that is really not good enough. Conservation is not only about buildings. It is about uses as well. It is only going to be useful for those places that have conservation areas covering their high streets.

It is far more fundamental than that. A successful policy, if you like, for PDRs would strip out anything that is readily convertible and replace it with an infinitely small amount of housing. It is a potential major loss to the centre, but it is a very limited gain to housing.

The one thing you have to remember is that a move to housing is a one-way trip. Once you have stripped it out, you have reduced the attraction of that centre. Having odd housing units - pepper-potting, if you like - reduces the attractiveness, the vitality, the footfall and the expenditure. It does not, as the Government claims, support those town centres. Yes, there will be places where you can lose shops but it ought to be done in a more controlled way rather than a blanket across-the-board relaxation.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): Thank you very much. Do you think it should be easier to get an Article 4 exemption for specific areas?

Michael Bach (Chair, Planning and Transport Committee, London Forum of Amenity & Civic Societies): Yes, I would say that, but unfortunately, if you read what is still only a proposal in the things that are being consulted upon at the moment, it is very clear that the Government does not envisage anything other than the most minimal areas being covered by Article 4 directions, and even then, {there will have to be] extremely good reasons. You might as well take it that Article 4 directions are more or less dead. That applies to the office exemptions that we have for the whole of the West End and various boroughs, and parts of other boroughs. It is very worrying. It is just a free-for-all.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): Assembly Member Devenish, did you want to come in on this question?

Tony Devenish AM: I agree with every word that Michael has said. This is one subject I do not agree with my Government on, frankly. We cannot have, as Michael has said, a complete free-for-all.

However, this is the GLA and I do want to ask Jules some questions because it is about a sense of urgency and what we are trying to do about this. We will lobby the Government but, clearly, we all remember what happened when Woolworths went under 10 years ago and we had huge voids all over our high streets. I am wondering, Jules, do we have a sense of urgency that we really realise that - it is an awful thing to say - almost a neutron bomb has gone off on many of our high streets even before COVID? Now, I am not always sure. We discuss these things in a very reasonable, modulated tone, but I am not sure if the GLA has the sense of urgency that many of our high streets are - I will not use the word ‘dying’ - certainly adapting.

There is one thing I would just love to hear from you, Jules, and then I will stop talking. Are there any simple tools that you can use? One of the problems, in my view, in regenerating the high street is, as Michael says, the residential industry in this country is very skilled. They will get to the sites first and they will turn them into housing and that will be it; whereas if between the BIDs that you mentioned and the local authorities and the GLA, we could have some kind of user-friendly online tool that shows the ownership structure and how to engage with people. Unless you spend your entire life in the property industry, as many of us do, it is a snakes-and-ladders jungle out there working out how to engage, and how to make sure we do get other uses on the high street and it does not just become yet more poor housing.

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): The GLA is in a good position to be able to not just make a contribution but lead in this area. High streets were already seriously threatened before the pandemic. That is across the country, but London did not entirely avoid the issue with many shops closing, shops being changed to uses such as charity shops to avoid business rates, and the move to online shopping. There are still some out-of-town retail shopping parades in outer London as well.

This was an ongoing problem that the GLA was working on. Just before the pandemic kicked in, we published our adaptive strategies work, which was not about a one-size-fits-all idea for high streets, but quite the opposite. It played to what you were just talking about, like working with communities in localities all across London - particularly the local authorities - for people to proactively think about how their high streets need to adapt to stay vibrant. This is not about simply propping up retail because the nature of retail is changing, as I said. It is about looking at different uses that bring people together. There is a huge social element and wellbeing element to local high streets. That is why one of the nine recovery missions in the Mayor’s London Recovery Plan is aimed specifically at high streets and it builds on that adaptive strategies work that is already in place.

The GLA does not have a huge pot of money that would enable us to transform all the high streets in London, so it is doing what it usually does in regeneration terms: doing exemplars that can be replicated across London. This particular recovery mission is looking for enhanced public spaces and new uses for underused high street buildings in every single borough by 2025. We want to see exemplars that show what can be achieved in high street projects in every single borough. The mission aims to deliver better high street greening, more cycling infrastructure and more local civic and cultural infrastructure as well, as attractors to bring people in. That is on an extended timescale, but in the short term we want to see more meanwhile uses and also bringing people together to plan both the short-term meanwhile uses and the longer-term uses that we want to see for these buildings.

We want to work with business owners as well. As you say, we expect communities, local authorities and BIDs to work with building owners to show them that there is an alternative to a quick flip to residential use. With a lot of landowners out there, there will be some sympathy to this, I am hoping, because when you look at the reaction from the British Property Federation, no less, and many companies big and small, they are horrified by this PDR proposal.

Like you, I agree with everything that Michael said, with one nuance about the inclusion of social infrastructure in Class E. If it were more structured like a ladder, like the old Class A where you could go down but not up, I would agree with you entirely because I am more than happy to see uses move to social infrastructure, but if they are all lumped in the same class, as you alluded to, it would be easier for doctors surgeries to become something else in Class E than the other, preferable, direction.

The reaction we have seen from property owners is that they see it as working against their interests, having inactive frontages pepper-potted like broken teeth in a parade of shops. They see that that is very unhelpful.

Also, it is very unhelpful, as is Class E, to delivering the change in high streets because it is going to need - and it is word that I often use - ‘curation’ in this context. It needs forward-thinking groups of people, boroughs, BIDs, landowners and so on to come together to curate a particular space. Where a landowner owns a lot of the property in an area, like a shopping centre, it is the curator. However, in high streets where ownership is fragmented, the primus inter pares, if you like, has now had some of the tools taken out of the box to achieve this because of the introduction of Class E. It is a concern that, while we know the direction we ought to go in, we are at a point where we are almost going to be disempowered in delivering it.

Tony Devenish AM: I agree with everything you have said, Jules, and I do worry whether there is a sense of urgency. I will give you one final example. It is a very built environment industry word, ‘exemplar’, and the public do not really know what it means. We want projects that we can paint a picture of so that others can take up that mantle.

I am going to plug my own home project, the Marble Arch Mounds at the end of the West End. It is only going to be there for a while. It is half the height - if it gets planning permission - of Nelson’s Column. It is an idea to try to get footfall back in the West End.

I am wondering - not now - if you could write to me because you and I know that there are certain local authorities and certain BIDs and certain property owners who are, frankly, better at this than the majority. If we could publish something as early as possible in the summer; at the moment we are far too much in a discussion and only people on this call understand all the nuances. We have to get tabloid, “This is how to do this”, and get people more engaged. I do worry we could end up with a huge backlash in terms of economic vitality of the high street in the last quarter of this year if we are not careful.

Thank you for all you are doing. Try to communicate and communicate and communicate more.

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): I agree with what you have said. On an optimistic note, I am hopeful that London once again, as it has many times over, and its entrepreneurs, will step into that gap. Whilst it is a tragedy, and I am not denying that at all in any way about the loss of many of the shops and I do not want to make light of that, there will be an awful lot of keen younger entrepreneurs who are going to come forward and that will be balanced by a pent-up demand for people to get out and to do things, particularly in the next year or two when people are not sure about foreign holidays. There is pent-up demand there and that is matched by pent-up entrepreneurialism that will want to take advantage of the spaces and some of the fall in rents that are in place at the moment. I just wish we had the regulation in place to be able to facilitate it.

Tony Devenish AM: Thank you, Chair. I invite Jules to the Marble Arch Mound when it is built.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): Thank you very much. Before we move on to the next question, can I apologise for not introducing our panel in advance? That was very remiss of me. We have already heard from Jules Pipe [CBE], who is the Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills, and Michael Bach from the London Forum of Amenity & Civic Societies. Our guests also include Simon Quinn, who is the Co-Chair of the Institute of Place Management and Executive Director of the High Street Task Force; Nick Plumb, Policy Manager from the Power to Change Trust; Rob McNicol, who is the [acting] London Plan Manager for the GLA; and Ziona Strelitz, the Founder Director of ZZA Responsive User Environments.

Now I would like to hand over to Nicky Gavron to ask the next question.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): Hello. Thank you for that, Chair. I wanted to mention, picking up on that last conversation and your point about exemplars, that - this is going way back - in about 2004 we brought over Jan Gehl, the architect urbanist who has transformed the city centres of many cities in different ways, starting with Copenhagen, his hometown. We brought him over to look at how we could make the West End, which is deemed to be a great shopping experience but a very unpleasant experience for pedestrians, a much better set of spaces. I looked at the report the other day and I do not know if you know it, Jules [Pipe CBE] and Tony [Devenish AM], but it is very timely. It was done with the Central London Partnership and Transport for London (TfL) and I hope Westminster [City Council] was involved. I do not know why it was not carried through, but it certainly has lots of ideas.

To introduce this session, it is really picking up from the more positive note that Jules [Pipe CBE] was encompassing in what he was saying before. We have a series of speakers - we are very lucky - who have all in different ways worked for years on the high streets and have really interesting ideas.

The first of those is Simon Quinn, who is leading - and I do not know how many of us knew about this before - the Government’s High Streets Task Force. I would like Simon to say a little bit about that and also how it is thinking of managing high streets differently, and what it is going to do to support them. Could you start, Simon, and then I want to go on to ask you a bit more about innovative uses and what that entails?

Simon Quinn (Co-Chair, Institute of Place Management, and Executive Director, High Streets Task Force): The High Streets Task Force is a Government-funded five-year project to support high streets. Our specific aims are to support the development of capacity in local authorities, to work with place leaders to develop their knowledge about place leadership, to get a national consensus on how high streets should be changed and supported, and to provide data and intelligence to local places. The data and intelligence come through 1,000 dashboards that are out now helping places to understand things like footfall, social media reports, carparking and other micro-indicators. We have been going since 2019. We have now recruited 180 experts from professional bodies who will advise the local authorities and they are being deployed now.

I have some slides that are going to be looking at the high street of the future. We have been doing a lot of thinking about what the high streets of the future will be like. When we did work with Sir John Timpson, who is leading the expert panel. We asked people what they thought the 2030 high street would be like and these are the things that were mentioned.

Particularly workspace in outer London centres might be a strong thing going forward. People will work at home, but every two days or so they will want to go in and see other people.

What we have realised is that various things influence the future. We are shopping as consumers now online in the evening. Why are we not doing more of it in town centres? London perhaps is way ahead in that aspect, but the future is there.

We have to think about population growth and the nature of that population. We will have an ageing population and that, we think, brings needs for elderly living into town centres.

We are seeing changes with the way people are moving around in town centres, coming and going. Bloomberg has suggested we have reached ‘peak car’ and there is other evidence I have to show that that is probably the case. We are seeing far fewer young people with driving licences now, and people travelling by other means.

We are going to see great change fairly imminently in terms of the arrival of electric cars with the new Government target of 2030 to stop the sale of petrol cars. We are going to see autonomous cars coming along as well. This will have consequences for what is in a town centre. The numbers are going to grow in terms of these cars on the road, but that also means that car parking need in town centres will reduce by 62% because these things can park themselves in a much neater and easier way.

Other forms of micro-mobility are going to be coming into our town centres. There has been rapid growth in e-scooters. I know there are legislative issues in this country but it is in inevitable that these will be around very soon as we put more streets over to pedestrian priority and cycles. Electric bikes are coming in and are a major innovation. They allow many elderly people and people who live in hilly areas to cycle quite long distances to access town centres.

We have to have a revolution on public transport. I know there was a boom in bus use in London, but that has been tailing away as it has been in the rest of the country. We have to think of new ways of ensuring that we get electric buses into our town centres. Much shopping and much other activity depends on these. Certainly, we have to think a lot more about how other cities and other towns are accessed in the evenings and at night.

We are going to have drones helping. This will solve lots of problems with congestion for deliveries. You can see the 42% annual compound growth is forecast for this.

Mobility as a service will be much more connected. You will say where you want to go on a journey and multimodal transport systems will be offered to you and paid for in advance.

We also need to think about what our towns and cities are going forward. Norwich has placed well ahead of this in identifying these different identities that people in the city and people visiting the city can identify with. Altringham is going further with a lot of stuff online looking at what makes the modern market town and how different people in the community contribute to that.

We are not very good at thinking about social media. We now find that 66% of consumers are spending three hours on social media and researching products on social media but only 28% of independent businesses are active. That has to change. This is going to be the way of marketing many cities and many towns in the future.

How do you get businesses involved in digital conversations? We as a Task Force have a social media company that is working with us and trying to show how local BIDs and local authorities can get involved in these conversations, plug the businesses in their towns and also be aware of what they are doing. It is great for co- ordinating events as well, and getting the community involved.

Retail will remain in many town centres, reduced in size with more independents coming in, but we are also seeing innovations in retail. Sharing and people not buying things but just using them for periods of time will definitely be happening. There will be a lot more personalisation with things like artificial intelligence (AI), which I am going to talk about in a minute or two. Every retailer will know an awful lot more about you, your favourite colours, your style and so on. Pop-ups are a continuous thing, but not just for retail. There will be leisure pop-ups, entertainment pop-ups, flash mobs and things that are part of that.

With retail plus, an amazing number of shops are now offering courses in baking, sewing, knitting and those kinds of things. That is often going to be in the evening and will carry on. Then there is experiential [retail]. These two guys were in menswear in the Netherlands and were struggling with sales. They started offering free coffee and that brought some people in. Then one of their friends said, “If only you brewed your own beer, we could drink beer”, and so they do now. Then the big companies like Target are providing showrooms rather than shopping.

One of the changes is going to be 3D printing. By 2030, 5% of all consumer goods will be printed. Many of these could be high street premises where people go in for the services.

We are seeing online retailers going into town centres, and the reason for that is that they find people buy more and spend more. We are even seeing Amazon taking space to bring some other businesses into it and trade for a period in the high street. That will continue.

When we look further into the future, the internet of things is going to revolutionise our life. They think that by next year 22% of people will have connections to the internet of things in their clothing and maybe other places. Our fridges will be ordering food for us and other things. This is a big change that is coming.

The other thing is that retailers are using the internet of things to, again, monitor stock and make changes in retail data.

AI is also a big thing that retailers are adopting, as is robotics. The most important thing from this is stock control increase. The forecast is that by 2030 this will save retailers $6 trillion.

I showed you this earlier, but what is interesting is how this happens. We are seeing things like food halls and forecast growth in both large and smaller centres. Some of these will be what we would perhaps call community hubs. Some will be the flagship ones.

What we are also thinking about - and we are now seeing towns do - is bringing in these other things that are going to be part of the high street future. We are looking at things for young people. We are looking at things for elderly people, perhaps company during the day, but maybe education. We are seeing lots of things that are about leisure, non-retail, culture and then town centre housing. We are looking at life science labs now coming into town centres - the staff prefer to work in a town centre - and colleges, education, gyms, wellness and community business space owned by the community itself. There are the things we have always had, and some of these are still there but we are seeing a reduction in the number of these premises in our town centres. If we are going to have people cycling into towns, we will have bike servicing and storage. That is certainly set to grow. There will be accommodation.

We need to think about the quality of the environment as we work towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. That is me done with the slides.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): That was a tremendous gallop through. It would be interesting to know, really, in what way you are working very closely with local councils. This is a tremendous, as I have said, smorgasbord you have shown us, but how are you making it happen? Do you have an example in London?

Simon Quinn (Co-Chair, Institute of Place Management, and Executive Director, High Streets Task Force): We do two things. We have a huge online depository, which has lots of case studies, best practice, step-by-step guides and things. That is freely available to anyone. We have 3,000 people registered. They get regular emails and updates from all of that.

What that does is two primary things. Research we did a few years ago, identified 25 priorities to create vitality and viability in a town centre. We asked people to take those and audit their town to see which ones were the ones where they needed to take action and which ones they were fine with.

The second thing we have is four strategic regeneration tools that we ask people to use and we have developed a roadmap to transformation, initially to get you from crisis to recovery, and then from recovery to the new future.

The first of these is looking at repositioning and telling you to get evidence to understand what is going on in your town. From that, you start to get some knowledge of what revision for your future town should be.

The second is rebranding. This is about involving your community, making sure that everyone understands what is going on, investors do and developers do.

The next one is reinvention. One of the concerns is that people make plans but do not do anything. How do you activate your centre? You talked about meanwhile uses and that also comes with the other things.

The fourth is restructuring and this is where the real challenge is. The way that town centres are governed is not right, with this idea involving businesses and the community alongside BIDs and what-have-you. The restructuring is also about better leaders. We do not have very good leadership in our towns and places and so we push that.

The other way we are doing things is by sending experts into town centres. We have agreed a list using a needs analysis with the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to identify those town centres that have that real priority. It will be roughly half the local authorities in England and that will go on until 2024.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): Do you have any London ones in that group?

Simon Quinn (Co-Chair, Institute of Place Management, and Executive Director, High Streets Task Force): We do, definitely. The first place we worked in London is Thornton Heath, but the list of London places is a proportionate list for the country as a whole.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): It would be great if we could get that list and if we could see what you are doing and also get some of the --

Simon Quinn (Co-Chair, Institute of Place Management, and Executive Director, High Streets Task Force): It is going to be launched on 15 March [2021] with MHCLG and the Minister [for Housing, the Rt Hon Christopher Pincher].

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): While you are on the MHCLG, it set up this Task Force, one bit of it, and then, with the other bit of it, it is bringing a sledgehammer to the high street with the PDR.

Simon Quinn (Co-Chair, Institute of Place Management, and Executive Director, High Streets Task Force): It is madness. I have written to the Minister and explained that; in partnership with 27 other organisations.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): Fantastic. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

On that note, thank you, Simon. We could ask so many more questions, but it is just so that we really get a flavour of what is out there that could help. I am sure that Jules’s High Streets Task Force is probably aware of quite a lot of these things. Anyway, it is good to hear them.

Simon Quinn (Co-Chair, Institute of Place Management, and Executive Director, High Streets Task Force): Could I just add? The website is highstreetstaskforce.org.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you. If we could move on now to Nick Plumb, you are doing some very interesting work at the community level. Can you tell us a bit about these innovative ideas you have and how you can make them work? Having ideas is one thing. Making them a reality is quite another.

Nick Plumb (Policy Manager, Power to Change Trust): To introduce myself, as the Chair mentioned, I am from Power to Change. We are an independent charitable trust established in 2015 and we are here to support community business across England. They are locally rooted organisations that trade for the benefit of the local community. Simon touched on the growth of community business on the high street in his talk.

I have a couple of examples to get your heads into the idea of a community business. In London we have, the Ivy House Community Pub in Nunhead; the Hill Station Community Café, a community café, shop and exhibition space in Lewisham; the Kensal Rise Library, a local library originally opened by Mark Twain and reopened in community hands recently; and Brixton Energy, a community energy project in Brixton. They have all manner of uses and aims, but all share that common characteristic of trading for the benefit of the local community and being locally rooted in their areas.

Our interest in the high street has really come from working with those community businesses, many of whom have seen a role for them on the high street. Lots of them, more traditionally, may have been based in local neighbourhoods and on housing estates, close to where people live, but over the years that has changed. That is in part due to the fact that the retail-dominated model of the high street really is over now. That has also been accelerated by the pandemic, as we have already discussed.

What we think we need at Power to Change is a civic model that is fit for the 21st century and we think that community businesses are a real part of this. They act as key destinations on the high street that pull people in and drive footfall, which we think is really important. People across the high streets stakeholder spectrum are aware of the need for these destination spaces to bring people into the high street. We see community businesses playing that role.

In London, we are seeing pockets of community-led activity on high streets, but it is fair to say that there is less of this in London than elsewhere in the country. I have a couple of examples of that role of community-led activity in London. Peckham Vision in the Rye Lane area of Peckham, which is a residents-led citizens association of individuals who live, work or run businesses in Peckham. They exist to develop an integrated approach to Peckham town centre. The Fonthill Road development in Finsbury is another great example of some of this stuff, in part led by the Council, which has leases on a number of shopfronts and workspaces, which it then lets to providers that have that community angle to them, which in turn provide affordable workspace for local micro-enterprises.

There are many unique barriers to community ownership and community activity on high streets in London, one of those being high property prices. We see less community ownership of land and buildings, which is really central to the community business model. We see less of that in London than elsewhere in the country for those reasons.

Thinking through some of the things that could be done to change that picture and boost the role of the community in high streets in London, one of the things we are doing is that we are involved in the Boosting Community Business London programme. That is a partnership between us, Co-ops UK and the Mayor of London, which is looking to provide small grants to organisations to enable them to develop community share offers whereby they offer an equity stake to local stakeholders in their community business. That helps them raise money and grow their community businesses.

One of the ideas that we have been most interested in in recent years, which some of you will be aware of, is the idea of the Community Improvement District as a new form of local governance to provide opportunities for community stakeholders to participate in operational and strategic decision-making for their neighbourhoods and really thinking about economic districts, economic centres, town centres and high streets across London.

These could be trialled through the High Streets for All Challenge Fund. The aim of that fund to bring people together in a local setting to set the direction for that high street; that feels really well set up to support the development of Community Improvement Districts in the medium term. Having that mechanism, which could be a loose set of guiding principles for local people to apply as they see fit, or something more structured and funded, will really help stakeholders develop their place for the benefit of all.

Community Improvement Districts - a little bit more about the idea - should be non-political, democratic and inclusive; concerned with the economic, social and environmental development of neighbourhoods; open to residents, businesses and other local stakeholders, including the local authority; and designed to complement other local mechanisms where they exist. If there is an existing BID, it may be that developing a Community

Improvement District is quite easy in changing some of the ways the BID currently works. It may be there are places with parish councils. There are not many in London but, where they exist, they would have to think about how they overlap with those, too.

We are really keen to see the GLA take a lead in trialling some of this. We are working with the Centre for London on a piece of research into the Community Improvement District model, which is undertaking interviews with hundreds of stakeholders across London to think about how that model would work. We are aiming to publish that by May this year [2021]. I am keen to stay close to the Committee and the GLA on this.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): The Community Improvement District is interesting. Is this along the Scottish model lines? Is Scotland quite developed in this respect?

Nick Plumb (Policy Manager, Power to Change Trust): You are absolutely right. I guess, in terms of legislation in Scotland, there are several things that we would like to see here in England that we think would enable greater community involvement in the high streets. Yes, they have developed them in Scotland. Several BIDs have developed to involve that resident-led element in their structures.

They also have a community right to buy. In England at the moment we have a community right to bid for buildings that the community thinks could be put to better use. We would be really keen to see some reform to the Localism Act here in the United Kingdom (UK) to get us there on a community right to buy. Equally, the Community Empowerment Act in Scotland does a good job of enabling greater community involvement at that local level.

The other thing that is important from a GLA perspective is making ownership more transparent, as mentioned by Assembly Member Devenish. That is one of the biggest barriers that many community businesses face. There might be a vacant building that they have great ideas for. Working out who owns that and how they can get their hands on it is really tricky. The GLA can play a role, working with the property sector to enable more transparency of ownership on the high street.

The other thing that would be useful is the development of a good landlords charter, looking at the things landlords can do to enable community involvement in the high street. As I mentioned, one of the unique characteristics of London is that there is less of this community ownership. It is more likely that communities will get a foot on the high street through working in partnership with landlords and through progressive leasing models. We have heard recently from Legal & General that it has developed a turnover link lease, which many community start-up businesses have been able to use. That feels like a useful development. Again, the GLA’s convening role to think about the things that should go into that landlords charter to enable community involvement is really important.

Finally, I wanted to touch on the idea of community-owned workspace on and beyond the high street in a post-pandemic world. Many community businesses already host shared workspace. Many of them in the past will have had meeting rooms and more permanent office space that they leased to other small businesses to act as real community hubs. Some of the community businesses we have spoken to have talked about how they can maybe repurpose some of that space to shared workspace in the local place, which, again, could be supported by the GLA’s Workspace Accreditation Scheme to ensure that the shared workspace we do have really has that community-led angle to it and is not a proliferation of companies like WeWork that might not have the social and environmental needs of the community at the forefront of their minds.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): We should come back to you at a future date for that. Ziona [Strelitz], in 2013 - a long time ago now - we did two investigations into the future of town centres and I vividly remember you coming and introducing us to the concept of third place working, which was new to the

Committee at that stage. It has been taken up in various ways and Nick [Plumb] has alluded to it. You have such a rich experience of repurposing and rethinking spaces in London. It would be good to hear from you.

Ziona Strelitz (Founder Director, ZZA Responsive User Environments): Thanks, Nicky. Yes, it was in 2011 when I published this report, which I called Why Place Still Matters in a Digital Age.

That is a really important title to remind ourselves of in relation to the structural changes we have been hearing about from Simon [Quinn]. There is a lot of fundamental structural change happening and I slightly fear that we get too caught up at the moment in the immediate multilateral effects of COVID. Some of the footfall pictures that we are hearing of during the COVID period are so interlinked with all of the activities one is not allowed to pursue that it is much more instructive to concern ourselves with the fundamental structural changes in transport modes, in shopping, in online education and in so many services that have migrated to online modalities, including a large part of the administration of justice, a large part of medical consultation and so on. Many opportunities or prompts that people would have had in the world as we knew it to go to a central physical building to have a need met will now not happen in that way.

My concern, particularly listening to today’s conversation but in general, is that the reasons that people will have to gather on high streets and in town centres will be significantly diminished. I have a very long-term interest in mixed use, not only for the economic synergies that mixed use offers but also for its social multiplier effects. Over the years in all of our building use studies, we have done research on what I call cross participation. If you go to a student union building for one reason and if there are other things on offer, do you step into them? If you go to a commercial campus like Regent’s Place in Euston for one reason, does the fact that there is other content [there] tip you into something else [as well]? Apart from the social capital that derives from that, there is now increasing evidence from the world of neuroscience about how being able to dip into micro contexts, even for a limited exposure, is so important to people’s wellbeing.

My point of entry to this Committee was in presenting my work on third place working. In the decade since I published the report, which essentially showed that many people [already] way back then were wanting to work away from a corporate employer, perhaps because they were not part of a corporate organisation, but not in their homes. We did research in a variety of inner London and outer London locations - and also replicated the research in greater New York, greater Paris, Hong Kong and Mumbai - to find out what it was that nudged people towards working near to home. This has now become, particularly through COVID, such a significantly recognised activity that it has its own acronym [WNH].

My concern is that amongst the range of opportunities [for third place working] that have come up over the last few years - the scope in libraries and in places like the Barbican and the South Bank Centre, civically held spaces where people could work without charge but well-facilitated - I have reason to suspect that that is now going to be under threat and, as public authorities are faced with a crunch in revenue, it is going to be something that they might seek to monetise. I have been approached by at least one organisation that has shared that with me as an explicit intention to take the job of allocating and booking civically owned workspace off the civic authorities’ hands in order to commercialise it. That is a minor red flag that I wanted to raise.

My bigger concern when listening to this conversation is how we can bring more of what in the local authority world is called ‘cross-portfolio’ development into the high streets so that we can bring in more than workspace to complement retail. Please take it as read that my concern with the potential extension of PDR to residential [use] is as great as everybody else in this conversation. That would absolutely fly in the face of the richness, the variety and the reasons that people need - and the multiple hooks that need to come together to create - some kind of personally and locally enriching place.

In the suite of work I do, [half of} which is called post-occupancy evaluation, we have, for example, done numbers of studies of new police stations, which happen to include four studies of Metropolitan Police [Service] facilities that have moved from town centres to industrial estates. These are publicly far less accessible. As I tell this story, I hear myself saying two minutes ago that many public services have migrated to online platforms, but still, the opportunity to go to a police station because it is available, because you can see it and because it is easily accessible, does enhance the experience and the functioning of individuals and of communities.

When I have been in conversations with local authorities about the scope to potentially aggregate, for example libraries with medical facilities and with police functions on high streets, one is being hit not only by the commercial rental factor, but by the difficulty of authorities, who all operate in different silos with different budgets and with different time horizons, getting themselves together to do something collectively. This has to be revisited as part of the conversation about the future of high streets. We have heard some examples today of possibilities to bring some focus and grist back to the need to do that, and the scope for local authorities and public agencies to so engage.

The final point that I would really like to make is that we are talking about fundamental structural changes, but we are actually faced with a very fixed spatial reality on high streets. We have a very linear physical structure with hard edges, and with the activity that takes place behind frontages and totally interiorised. We know from all sorts of research data that people do not often cross the threshold unless it is [for] something they desperately want or something they desperately need.

We really ought to be reconsidering some ways of potentially breaking some of these edges. Being dramatic, I was very interested to hear that Stoke-on-Trent, for example, is demolishing a shopping centre to create a town centre park. Similar considerations are now at play in Nottingham in relation to the Broadmarsh Centre, which is a proposal that we made a few years ago when I was on the English Heritage Urban Panel. If you think about the kind of footfall that Granary Square now attracts at Kings Cross, with families bringing their kids to play in the fountains all summer and with the multiplier effects of that socially and economically, those are the kinds of interventions that we need to be thinking about to give strength and reasons to come to our high streets.

We have not had much conversation today about spatial interventions. We do know that even small spatial interventions, which are the kinds of moves that take place so that people can see across to what there is, people can see behind a frontage to a space where they can sit, relax or play, can be hugely significant for the adjacent activity. That is really the point that I would like to end on to say how beneficial such extension of physical thinking is to the missions of the London Recovery Board.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): That was very interesting. Thank you for that. That has implications for our Public London Charter on the public realm. It has implications for the way we design in so many ways. I want to say that we do have a very good basis for a further session to probe this more, and discuss how we get over some of the barriers.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): Most certainly. Can I ask Assembly Member Shah now to ask the next question?

Navin Shah AM: Good morning, everyone. My question is about the Mayor’s recovery mission. Jules, you have already set a clear picture or scenario as to what the recovery mission is about. I want to go into further detail in terms of what that actually means on the ground and the nuts and bolts. I believe that the initiative was due to be launched this month. Can you tell us what the next steps are on implementing this high street recovery mission?

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): As I said, the aim of the high streets recovery mission is to deliver enhanced public spaces and really exciting new uses for underused high street buildings across London. It is going to be through fostering local engagement and partnership formation, and bigger, better high street greening, cycling infrastructure, more visitors during the day and in the night-time and limiting business vacancy rates. There will be an advocacy role as well about business rates reform to enable our high streets and town centres to thrive. There will be a whole facet around new technologies and promoting civic innovation and certainly an accent on increased social infrastructure as well. It will draw on the 15-minute city idea and having all Londoners’ needs met within a short walk or cycle ride. There will be growth in the social economy and there has been, rightly, a lot of mention of that today: community businesses, social purpose organisations, and central London’s role reimagined as a centre for enterprise, collaboration and innovation. That is the context that we are working in.

For the next steps, you are absolutely right, there is a lot of work going on this March [2021]. There is already a conversation, if you like, that is being fostered through Talk London to engage people in this idea about high street partnership formation and to promote a London-wide culture of idea formation and invention.

As well this month we are launching the High Streets for All Challenge Fund alongside the Possibilities Playbook, which is about not being one-size-fits all but having different ideas and encouraging local groups and authorities to come up with their ideas. As I say, it has exemplars and ideas to encourage that. That is going to be accompanied by an invitation to boroughs to put forward exemplars that they want to do for a share of funding. We would want them to submit their applications by this July [2021].

This March, we are announcing the first round of Make London pledges as well. That will be supporting community, civic and cultural organisations to take this work forward. Also - and I mentioned it earlier - the High Street Data Service will be launching later this month.

In July [2021], we will be initiating the High Street Improvement Register as well. That will be a shared resource between the GLA, TfL and boroughs to track public space improvements as well so that we will be more co-ordinated about where everybody’s intervention is across London.

Also, Nick [Plumb] mentioned earlier about a landlords charter. That will be in September. We are launching a High Street Landlords Charter and that is going to be all about promoting flexibility, something we talked about today, encouraging business owners to think more widely and higher than the lowest common denominator, and affordability, and to help foster thinking in the commercial sector about the wider social value. Part of this will be a meanwhile brokerage to encourage that because we think that in the short term that will have a role to play.

Those are certainly some of the steps that we hope to be taking over the next three or four months.

Navin Shah AM: Jules, you mentioned the Challenge Fund, which you said will be launched this month. Can you tell us what the figure is? Can you also tell us how it will work and how it will be used? Will there be bids from the boroughs? Just expand on that and the duration of the Fund as well. Thank you.

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Yes. It is probably best and most accurate for the Committee’s information if I send the details to you, but the headlines are that it is a Fund of more than £3 million. That cannot do every high street in London, as I said. That is why we would like at least one application per borough to the Fund. We would like those to be submitted by July.

Navin Shah AM: OK. Is this for the period of overall -- I think you said 2025. The mission includes the vacant spaces, vacant units and so on.

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Yes, that is the period of time that we would expect the projects to be taking place, but that is not to say that delivery is in 2025. Delivery encompasses the coming together of people to engage on what they would like to see on their high streets. If you like, the very end goal of the transformed space is the full stop at the end of the sentence. The very beginning of this process of delivery is actually the engagement that starts now.

Navin Shah AM: I have also come across an increased Good Growth Fund of £8 million. Is there any element of that £8 million that is going to support this initiative or help high street rejuvenation in any way?

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Yes. These funds have a common thread. They are about community space, creating social value and building better civic space. There is a common thread that runs through these.

Navin Shah AM: The Mayor also mentioned in one of his answers in the Assembly about expert advisers as well as best practice sharing. Can you elaborate on this and how this will work? This is important. Funding is critical but, equally, best practice sharing as well as any expert advice that can be given in terms of strategy is equally important. Can you tell us how this will work?

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Yes. One example is the work that the GLA has been doing on high streets and the adaptive strategies and the seminars we have been running. I have chaired seminars with groups of Mayor’s Design Advocates, leading practitioners in the different fields within the built environment sector coming together to input into the documents that are available, that the GLA has published as guidance for town centre and high street strategies.

Navin Shah AM: I want to move on to the next bit, which is the proposal for class E PDR. If that goes ahead, do you think it will have a negative impact on what we are trying to achieve in terms of high street recovery? If it is implemented, can the Mayor do anything to counteract the impact that it will have in achieving our objectives?

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Everyone who has spoken on it today has pointed out the flaws in it. I would say that it is unfortunate that the Government has taken a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The nut was that sometimes there was too little flexibility displayed by local authorities.

Let me give you an example. A bike shop was expected to be A1 retail and to sell bikes. You either came out with a bike or a bag with an accessory in it and that was it. It has been the case too often in the past where boroughs would perhaps frown on offering a café facility as well and would say, “Sorry, we are not mixing A1 and A3 or A4 in your operation”. Clearly, in many parts of London, cycling is as much a way of life as it is a mode of transport.

Being so hidebound in the application of some of the regulations is unfortunate and that did lead to a call for greater flexibility between use classes. As I said, Class E is a sledgehammer to crack that nut and allows too much transfer between use classes, the control of which would be very helpful going forward to curate the mix of things that we would like to see on our high streets as they change. And change they will, for all the many reasons that the speakers have said today.

There is a great deal of not uniformity but meshing together of all the things the speakers have said today. I do not think anyone has disagreed with each other about the influences and about the direction of travel that we would need to go in to see a continuation of vibrant meeting place in the hearts of our communities. I think everyone is on the same page.

Sometimes, at the end of the day, you need some practical decision-making tools to enable that to happen when an application is brought to a local authority. Class E, unfortunately, does undermine that box of tools that the local authority has to deliver on the aspirations that we have been talking about today.

Finally, as for what the Mayor can do, it is very limited. As you have heard, Article 4 directions proved very useful before to deter some of the conversions of offices to residential, particularly in the Central Activities Zone (CAZ) area. Unfortunately, we did not get as many of them across London, particularly as outer parts of London wanted, but back in around 2015, 2016 or whenever it was, I know that the boroughs did secure more in the CAZ area. The current Mayor has always said that he is willing to work with boroughs to help them to do that. As you heard Michael [Bach] say earlier today, it is very limited now and the Government is saying that it would very much like to limit the scope of those.

I could talk about the mitigations that could be brought in like maximum size thresholds. Conservation areas is an obvious example, and my point about Class E and Class E(f), which is for nurseries and medical facilities, only being one way. Whilst, yes, any mitigation would be good, it is tinkering at the edges. That is uniformly the position not just on our panel today but from the property industry itself that they do not see this. It has taken the MHCLG by surprise the degree of unanimity from all sectors that this is not a helpful move.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): What we do know, as Nicky Gavron alluded to earlier, is that this is a subject that we could spend not just a whole meeting on, but three or four meetings on. It is of such importance to Londoners. I am afraid that for today we are going to have to move on.

Our second panel of guests now joins us on the topic of tall buildings. We are very pleased that the Deputy Mayor [for Planning, Regeneration and Skills] is staying with us for this second panel and we can also welcome now Elliot Kemp, who is the Principal Strategic Planner at the Greater London Authority (GLA), and Nicholas Boys Smith, who is the Founding Director of Create Streets. Good morning.

I would ask Murad Qureshi if he can start the questioning off in this section.

Murad Qureshi AM: We are going to concentrate on the impact of COVID on tall buildings. I will start with Nicholas.

The Committee heard from guests at our last meeting that during the first pandemic lockdown that the higher you got off the ground, the less comfortable you were in terms of your living environment and your happiness in your neighbourhood. Do you think we should be doing more to promote other types of densities in light of this?

Nicholas Boys Smith (Founding Director, Create Streets): I will quickly say upfront that I recognise that the London Plan and all the work underpinning it is a huge piece of work involving superhuman levels of effort. If anything I say comes over as critical of it, it is not done in an unconstructive spirit. To Deputy Mayor Pipe and all his officials, anything I say is not done in an assertive or aggressive way.

Look, the pandemic has brought to light - hopefully more starkly than will be true in the future - what we already knew from the large corpus of evidence about the associations between living in big buildings rather than tall buildings - tall buildings are a type of big building - and the wellbeing of residents. Very big buildings are sociologically fragile and non-resilient. That is not to say that you can never make them work or that they never work, and it is not to say that some people do not love them - some people do - but it is harder and more expensive. We are always pushing water uphill because we have created a physical environment that is very far away from how our brains naturally work and how most of us want to live. We are relying on double- loaded corridors, heavy internal infrastructure and high management costs.

For example, last year we did a survey of nearly 500 people about the relationships between where they live and how connected they feel with their neighbours during lockdown. Almost off the top of my head, we all know and it will be uncontroversial that greenery is a good thing for our wellbeing as humans, but the key thing is not the quantum of greenery in a larger area. It is the ease of access to greenery. It is how close it is, particularly for children for obvious reasons. Our research found that access to front gardens and private back gardens was very clearly associated with more neighbourly interactions compared to environments with no outdoor space immediately contingent on the home. Those with gardens had much more of an increase in talking to other residents than those without. We also found that gentle density - which is a phrase we use a lot in Create Streets, by which we mean terraced houses or lower mansion-block flats - were clearly associated with more neighbourly interactions than small flats and large homes.

Some of that was lockdown related and some of that will, hopefully, diminish in the future, but it mirrors research done by the Place Alliance and it mirrors lots of older research on that question about how we live as communities and how we optimise the advantages of density - more sustainable living patterns, easier to do mixed use - with the advantages of greater space. In every single econometric study ever done of value of property, people pay more for larger homes because there is a clear value to humans in having more space and having very readily accessible green space. It is fine to be building tower blocks. There is a place for them, particularly in a large international city such as London. However, they are typically going to work for people who select them, for people without children and in very well-connected places. That is how the London Plan does focus on them. If we can deliver and continue to deliver more density through the gentle intensification of existing streets in a well-structured block framework with ready coterminous access to green space, that would be better for Londoners in the medium to long term and so I would certainly urge that. I hope that is helpful.

Murad Qureshi AM: My real concern, looking at my local neighbourhood, is some of the densities proposed in the regeneration schemes. We are not necessarily talking about that here, but let me just put this down as a note if people do not mind. These are the same areas where you have had some of the highest fatalities very often and there is a case to look again at the densities of a lot of regeneration proposals. Some may say they have just got to be better managed. I have not seen evidence of that in previous regeneration schemes and let us hope that that does materialise in some way.

Can I now move on to Jules [Pipe CBE] and Elliot [Kemp]? Jules, we have heard a lot about Londoners’ living experiences through COVID-19, those who perhaps live in cramped apartments and have had to work, eat and study in one small space, often without a garden or balcony. What impact will the pandemic have on the relevance of the London Plan’s tall building polices?

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): First, can I say that I agree with absolutely every word that Nicholas [Boys Smith] said? That is absolutely our intention and certainly it is in the Plan. Unfortunately, we are not always as much as we would like presented with applications that fit with our ideal, which is something we can perhaps explore now or at a later time.

As for the impact of the pandemic, I have to say that it is probably too early to tell, the impact and its relevance on existing policies. What is already in the Plan? It speaks very much to the concerns that people have expressed throughout the pandemic. The pandemic has emphasised the need, as Nicholas [Boys Smith] has mentioned or alluded to, for good quality homes, access to outdoor space, but also adequate space inside, good light and good ventilation. These are the same whether you are in a tower block, a low-rise block or a small house. All these issues are relevant, and they are already key components of the London Plan and the draft Good Quality Homes for All Londoners, which is the subsequent London Plan guidance on how to implement that part of the Plan. The access to private outdoor space: that is in the Plan as well. There is a minimum prescribed in there, which goes further than the Government’s nationally prescribed standards. Even space for working from home is in the Plan, enough space for a desk and a chair and some small amount of storage space. As I say, these are ideals and it is all what we would like to see. We all know it is a challenge when presented with an actual application, but policy-wise and what the Mayor would like to see is there in the Plan and that was not a result of COVID. There is all the greening and urban greening approach taken in the Plan as well.

To cut what I am saying short, the Plan does not need to be altered as a result of COVID. It just simply highlights what we should have been doing already and which we should be striving to do in what we build.

Elliot Kemp (Principal Strategic Planner, Greater London Authority): I would add that the Plan slightly shifts the focus about where tall buildings go and so it is very much up to boroughs to decide where they go. It does not say, for example, that they are automatically appropriate in an opportunity area or a town centre, which was the implied implication of the previous Plan. I want to highlight that slight shift in the two policies.

Murad Qureshi AM: Can I come back to you Jules? We have undertaken a survey about whether people want to stay in London during the pandemic. When we did this last summer, it was saying that one in seven were thinking of moving either out to the London suburbs or out further. We are doing it again to update. In the meantime, we have had studies from the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence suggesting we have lost about 700,000 Europeans as a result.

Are people moving already without us really taking on board this impact on the overall Plan? It is not a criticism. It is the reality we may be living under.

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): I do not want to be complacent and the team is not, either. These stories do come round like clockwork every two years that there is an exodus from London. I can probably show you The Guardian articles from 2017, 2015 and 2013, which all thought for one reason or another there is an exodus from London, and each time they do not happen.

What is true at the moment is that we will see a drop in numbers because of the drop in activity. We do not have the long-term international visitors that we used to have. We certainly do not have the long-term international business visitors, who will come for six-month secondments or whatever to work for the firms in central London. We do not have the international students coming here. There is also a national version of those activities that see shifts to London for a certain period of time. That is all those people who have retrenched back to their home locations, so that has clearly seen a diminution. There will be some element of European migration but, as I say, these are activity-driven. When we see a restoration of a lot of the activity that we used to in central London, particularly culture as well as office-based activity, we will see a return to numbers that we expect.

As I say, we are monitoring it very closely and will continue to, but at the moment we do not see any reason to say that either there is less of a need for offices or less need for residential. We cannot forget that there is quite a backlog still, a huge backlog, in housing to address housing need and so we will continue to need to build homes. As I say, it often is brought up about the future need for offices. People need to think about office space and how people will want to use office space in the future. There will be an increased demand in collaborative space and that might be actually more hungry in square footage or as hungry in square footage as giving everybody a desk and expecting them to turn up five days a week. Again, as with housing, for the offices it is equally too early to make any quick assumptions about what the needs are as a result of the pandemic.

Murad Qureshi AM: Thank you, Jules. Just to reassure you, I am not a Guardian reader, actually.

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): No, I was just saying that for some reason it seems to be a popular topic for The Guardian and The Independent.

Murad Qureshi AM: The basis of this Plan is different. We have seen for the first time in living memory in the neighbourhoods that I live in, for example, private rent levels go down. Now that is something that I have not heard for 30 years in London. All I can reassure ourselves with is that we have a census this month, later on, and maybe whilst it is a snapshot it will give us a real picture of where we are with this in the middle of recovery from the lockdown probably.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): Thank you very much. Could I ask Nicky Gavron now to come in?

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): Jules [Pipe CBE], for a moment I wanted to go back to what you were saying about the Plan with these ideal standards and so on. I do not see the Plan policies and standards as ideal; I see them as ‘the policies’ and ‘the standards’. I remember well. There are opportunities for the Mayor - and you will be there with him, I guess - when these pre-application meetings come in. These are the big schemes, but there are huge opportunities to actually influence what is produced and really set the bar high. Really, we are not setting the bar high. We are just saying, “These are our standards. This is what we require”. I just want to make that comment because it worries me a bit. I know what you are saying, because what comes in is definitely not what one wants a lot of the time, but that does not mean that the Mayor does not have huge influence in terms of making policy.

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Nicky, absolutely, I would agree with you 110% and particularly the last sentence that the Mayor has huge influence in the setting of policy.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): What about the implementation?

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): The reality is that however much one at pre-app or within Plan policy states what is required from a development, both in terms of what one would like to see it look and feel like and how it should work and the benefits to communities but also the offsetting mitigation that it needs to provide such as contributions to social infrastructure like doctors’ surgeries, transport, local education facilities. The issue that we face in the country, and certainly London faces, is that these competing demands on a development mean that compromises are, unfortunately, made. Without a greater amount of affordable housing subsidy, for instance - less than £100,000 is contributed at the top end for a social unit - that is relying on a development to self-fund an awful lot of affordable housing. That is in competition with funding all the mitigation. One might see it as mitigation, but others might see it just as the natural contribution that developments ought to be making to civic infrastructure locally and so balance is taken.

It would be dishonest of me - of anyone - to say that developments always do sail through, having met every demand that is made of them, or that should be made of them, or things that we would like to see them deliver. Even if they are viability tested to death and the profit margin of the developer is minimised to something approaching 12% or less, often there still is not enough money left in the pot. It would be dishonest to say it could just be turned down. We have set the policy bar very high in what we would like to see, but the ability to deliver it within the local planning setting - and, indeed, when it gets through the GLA - is where the challenge lies.

I am a layperson who is in a privileged position to be involved in policy setting on behalf of the Mayor and the public. Rob [McNicol] and Elliot [Kemp] are at the sharp end of having to advise on how well individual applications measure up to the policy we would like to see delivered. Perhaps they are better positioned to comment on the reality than I am.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): I know just what you are talking about. There are trade-offs and there are compromises, but it was just when we are talking about space standards. We have minimum space standards for a lot of things. We have the standards --

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): We do not trade them off. The internal space standards we do not trade off. For example, the amount of play space for children, 10 square metres of play space per child, and those kinds of things are not tradeable.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): Absolutely. Yes, you are getting to where my question is really, which is I wanted to ask about tall buildings and families. OK. At some point we need to have a discussion about what is not tradeable. It is really important and some of what you are talking about, which is the desk in the room and the extra things, those things that make these flats habitable, the balconies and so on, cannot be traded off as well.

I wanted to get to families in tall buildings because there will be families in tall buildings, however much we think tall buildings are not really the appropriate places for families. The Assembly has said that we definitely want to see the lower floors having larger flats. In a way, you cannot legislate for people in two-beds, high up in a tall building, not having children, but at least you can accommodate larger families on the lower floors.

Really, what I want to talk about is how you can make sure - and you are there, sitting there with the applications and so is Elliot - that the play space for younger children is capable of being surveyed so that there is proper access to it. I will leave you with that.

The other thing I hear quite often now is that tenures are still separated so that you have a podium and the access to that podium is restricted to a certain group, who live near it or above it, and so you do not get integrated play space. I am just wondering how you are coping with this on the bigger estates.

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Perhaps your last point first. Yes, the London Plan is absolutely clear about being tenure-blind on things like play space and it should be integrated and it is actually clear that it should be integrated, and therefore the way of meeting that would be as a single offer. I am very well aware, as I am sure everyone in this meeting is, about the difficulties of integration of tenure and the impact on service charges and the reluctance of registered social landlords (RSLs) to take on onerous service charges. We take the view that that is very unlikely to be onerous with the respect of play space outside and gardens. It is very unlikely that the expenditure on the gardens would be so high- end that it would be prohibitive to integrate it. There have been cases where it has been highlighted to City Hall and the Mayor has intervened and got barriers taken down on specific new builds where, against what was proposed in the plan stage, the application stage, they have divided play space. The Mayor has intervened and had those barriers removed.

On the issue of creating play spaces overlooked by family housing, that is the most desirable situation and it is sought and can be delivered on sites that are large enough that the layout allows for that. A state regeneration scheme, for example, would more often than not provide the opportunity to get that right. The problems are where we have a tight plot on, say, the Old Kent Road, that someone is intending to build on. Land values and all the other factors that we could discuss way beyond the remit of this particular topic that drive the typology that ends up on that site do not lend themselves to a courtyard, because there is no courtyard at all because of the size of the plot. We end up with a typology that does not have immediate play space, let alone overlooked. It really is the geography of the site that will determine the delivery of our policy. It will be one of those things that is often in planning where it will be sought and demanded if it can be delivered, but sometimes it is simply not practical.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): Does this mean that a play space is less of a priority than other factors?

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): No. It would be delivered in a different way. For external play space, we would look for a neighbouring park to have investment and things upgraded. If there was a local park that lacked children’s play facilities, it would be typical for a development to be required to make a contribution to upgrading those if it proves impossible to provide external children’s play space as part of the development. That is different from the external play space that would be required in the flat. For example, a flat might be required to have so many metres of external space such as a balcony, but in addition to that there would be the 10 metres per child of play space that the block would be required to deliver.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): This is about accessibility because Nicholas Boys Smith said earlier it is not just about having the play space; it is being accessible. Only a few weeks ago, I sat through a Planning Committee on the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham where there was play space but it was on the roof of the neighbouring building that would require the child to go in a lift, down to the ground floor and up another lift in order to play. That is what concerns people. Those examples concern people about how important play space, accessible play space, is. Is it just something you stick on as an afterthought? It sounds like in some circumstances it is an afterthought.

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): No, it is very --

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): Jules, can I come in? I have examples of estates which have been done in a Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) way where there is enormous casual vandalism because no play space has been given. There are a few planters around and kids are just jumping over them and kicking them over because they have nothing.

The other thing I want to say is - and I understand the park argument - that if you are older, under-5s and younger children should always be accommodated onsite. In only exceptional circumstances should we be directing children - and it has to be an accessible park, not across a canal or a busy road - to somewhere nearby.

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Yes, I would entirely agree, Nicky, and that was my point. That is only in exceptions. I just wanted to highlight the exceptions because I knew those exceptions existed.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): Frankly, people should not be allowed to just say, “We have a plot here and we are going to maximise on this plot and forget about the other obligations that the London Plan gives us”. I am not sure about that at all. Anyway --

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Nicky, I did say that it is not about forgetting it. It is about providing it in a different way if it proves impossible to deliver it on site.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): Say there is no park nearby. Then what? I am just saying I can imagine this. There could be no park nearby and it still goes ahead. I am very concerned about this. A lot of the casual vandalism leading to some of the gang behaviour is because there is nothing on the estate for people, and the Mayor has made a promise that there will be ball game activities on these bigger estates. Ten square metres for teenagers is free, it is accessible and it is on the land. It is a perfect way of getting some activity space for kids and we should not be shunting them off to somewhere nearby that may or may not work.

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): As I say, Chair, it would perhaps be useful to hear from Rob as to the practical application of this when they are assessing these situations.

Rob McNicol (London Plan Manager (Acting), Greater London Authority): Yes, I totally understand the points that are being made here. We need to make sure we are not in danger of focusing overly heavily on the exceptions, but there are going to be particular circumstances where one individual site may not be able to accommodate a particular requirement because of how curtailed it is. However, the larger schemes are often going to be coming forward in places like opportunity areas. In places like that where you have got an opportunity area planning framework, or where you have a wider master plan covering a larger area, you would absolutely expect those places to be thinking about play space, about open space and about how that can be located in very close proximity to the buildings that are around them, and making sure that independent mobility for children and young people is embedded in the design of those opportunity areas and those master plans.

Certainly, there would be very few situations where you would be forced into a position of making an exception, and the policy is really clear about the quantities of play space and the requirements for those to be accommodated on site. One of the helpful things about having policies that are numerically based, as we do with the policies on play space, as we do with the policies on internal space standards and external private amenity space, is it is very easy to see which schemes are meeting those numbers. The architects and designers can really use those numbers at that really early stage in considering the design for those schemes.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): Yes, that is great to hear actually, Rob. It also means it is really staking out a certain amount of land that is devoted to age-appropriate provision. I want to just come back to that. The policies in the London Plan are absolutely great and the supporting text is great and hats off to all of you for working on that. There is also a promise that we are going to have a supplementary planning guidance (SPG), which is going to give guidance on that age-appropriate provision and on the 10 square metres. I absolutely endorse all the other moves that have been made for independent mobility and so on, but while you have still “No ball games” all over, plastered everywhere, we are not going to really be making the most of what is such an astonishing opportunity, 10 square metres, aggregated. Put that together and you have got something really good.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): Thank you very much for that, Nicky, and I apologise for my intervention. As the guests will understand, this area of play space and social infrastructure, if you like, is very, very important to the Assembly.

Nicholas Boys Smith (Founding Director, Create Streets): Can I just say one very quick thing on play? I would preface it by saying I totally recognise the pressures that Jules [Pipe CBE] and his team are under in terms of housing delivery versus play space. I would echo what Rob [McNicol] said about the importance of numerical rules on this, but I would add visual ones as well.

There are two things I would say very quickly. This does bring into sharp focus the tension between accessibility to play space in a private or safely accessible communal garden for children, particularly young children, versus density. Given the pressures the GLA in London is under, there is no easy answer to that and so I have sympathy with you all. The importance of urban form has not quite come into the conversation enough. Just to slightly echo what I said before, perhaps more emphatically, if you do not have ready access, particularly for younger children, to that green space either in a private garden or a safe, communal garden. There is a very good paragraph in the London Plan linked to Healthy Streets about regreening and making safer streets because part of the answer to this if you cannot, due to density reasons, get it to work on site or very close to site, is to have streets and squares and public spaces, which are part of the normal urban infrastructure. Streets are our most timeless infrastructure in London. Some of the streets are literally 2,000 years old. The Old Kent Road, for heaven’s sake, predates the Romans. I will not say it is our get-out-of-jail free card because you do not even get those in real life but at any rate it is jolly helpful and so that is a plea for urban form.

Just picking up on what Rob [McNicol] said about numbers, if, within the constraints of the volume targets, you are under you are able to be much tighter on upper limits for heights and density on certain sites, you will to some degree reduce those pressures on accessible play space versus overall density. I recognise that is easier for me to say than for you to do. Otherwise, with lovely policy in terms of playgrounds over there, we are going to be recreating - in some places we are recreating - exactly the same pressures that we created 40 years ago in some very, ultimately it turned out, foolishly conceived schemes. I hope that is helpful.

Murad Qureshi AM: Jules [Pipe CBE], has the Mayor delivered on his tall building commitments, particularly in safeguarding London’s skyline? Are the good folk of Richmond happy with the protection of St Paul’s [Cathedral] still?

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): The quick answer to your initial question is, yes, I believe that he is proving to be an appropriate guardian of the skyline. Of course, there are always pressures, not least from the [City of London] Corporation, where we see the most recent case. It is ongoing, which therefore means I cannot say too much about it, but we know achieving it is a particular challenge at the moment, literally in the courts. We have looked at the framework and have not reduced the view framework in any way.

The problem that you highlighted though from the view from Richmond to St Paul’s highlighted the shortcomings of how the original framework was described because no one ever imagined that buildings that tall would be built in Stratford or further away from St Paul’s, towards outer London. Therefore, when the maps were drawn, the cones were truncated and did not go on to infinity. Therefore, the area for consultation and making sure that those planning the buildings were aware they may be in a corridor and take action did not occur in that case, because the viewing corridor fell short of getting as far as Stratford. That is one change we have made and now they go on to infinity and so for anyone in the viewing corridor or in the shoulders of the viewing corridor that is now taken into account, so we should not see a repeat of that.

There is another case we are currently tackling with Convoys Wharf where it was not until the advent of 3-D modelling that we realised that the topology, the curve, of the Thames Valley means that we have a problem there with a building that needs to be lowered. We have caught it in time and the developer now has the opportunity to lower it and redistribute the density elsewhere on the site to ensure that it does not affect the dome of St Paul’s.

Murad Qureshi AM: Jules, I will say what you cannot say. The City of London Corporation has a lot to answer for on the skyline of central London.

The other area, which you should look at possibly, on the skyline is that there are other skylines that need protecting. The one that is dear to me, would you believe it, is the one along the Westway. There is more merit to it than people realise and maybe we spend far too much on places like Richmond or what have you, and not looked at places where there is a high density of people. We have had some encroachments on them recently with the Brunel building in Paddington, for example. That is my point made and I even have Tony [Devenish AM] nodding to that one and so I must be saying something right.

Can we now go to the SPG that Nicky [Gavron AM] mentioned earlier? I was just wondering whether we could expect to see a new SPG specifically for residential tall buildings.

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Yes. Certainly, the Good Quality Homes SPG is going to be published in the summer and so that will be covering all typologies. There is a slight delay because we need to consider the implications of the Government’s own proposals for the National Model Design Code. We are in the vanguard of bringing forward designs and wanting boroughs to develop their own local design codes, but the Government has picked that up and is getting involved in that space, too. We need to make sure that our Good Quality Homes SPG takes that into account, but we are hopeful of publishing it in the summer.

Murad Qureshi AM: OK, thank you for that update. Then the Good Quality Homes SPG: do you expect that will have to be revised at any point now the impacts of the pandemic have been realised?

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): No. Again, I think it is the same as the Plan really; that we will publish in the summer. Overwhelmingly, it would have been determined by what we think is good design. Whether it is within buildings, the buildings themselves, the public space in between, as I said, the pandemic has highlighted what we always needed. It is not introducing new needs.

Nicholas Boys Smith (Founding Director, Create Streets): Just a couple of quick thoughts that I hope are helpful to Jules [Pipe CBE] and his team in taking forward the Good Quality Homes SPG and, yes, in the context of the National Model Design guide with apologies because, as I said, I mean this constructively. It is a slightly flawed document and I do not mean that in an aggressive way. I know these things and have worked on many of them, incredibly hard to do, and I am sure the team suffers lots of pressures and constraints I am unaware of. I do not say that in a nasty way, I hope.

I assume - but I may be making a false assumption - that the ultimate end user of this document is partly the boroughs and it is partly, I assume, smaller landowners or potential developers, who you are trying to encourage to be part of a richer and more complex medley of developers so we are not just reliant on a relative handful of big guys. If that is the case - and my assumption may be incorrect - I would passionately urge/plea/beg as a London resident to make it simpler, more visual and more numerical, again very much picking up on what Rob [McNicol] hinted at earlier. It is just quite hard to make your way through, so I would really urge you. I know that Andy von Bradsky [Head of Architecture, Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government] and David Rudlin [Director of Urbanism, Environment and Design] were working on the National Design Code. It went through many, many iterations of it and a lot of work went into it. I have to say it is a very good document, the National Design Code. This is not a partisan comment; this is a technical comment. This is not a criticism one way or the other. More work is required really on the visualisation and the structure of it so that it is usable to a non-expert. I really urge that.

If I may, I went through some of the worked examples earlier this morning because I thought I had better have read it before I spoke to you all. You do not take enough account of urban form. Looking at some of the different density outputs you get, based on the work we and others have done on how safe and private and public block structures and street structures work, the three answers you get to are missing. You have got lots of good stuff in there, but you are missing a key bit of what evidentially links where people live with good outcomes, particularly in poorer segments and for children. I would really urge you, if you do feel you need to update it, to layer in that if I may as one of your critical factors.

I have a final point and I will shush. The thing with design codes is they cannot cover every eventuality and you should not try because you will fail. Just reading this, there is a slight sense that some of the, no doubt, great people working on the teams on it have been trying to think, “How can we make sure we are covering everything?” Relax, guys. You are not going to. Do not worry about that. Just try to make it easier for landowners and developers, community groups, neighbourhood forums, whatever it might be, to have really good, worked, ideally costed, visualised, popular -- it does not use the word ‘popular’ at all in the SPG. It should do. We should worry about what is popular and that would be easier to get through. Sorry, I have distracted myself into a coda there, but just worry about what can work in the good, ordinary situation. There are some quite standard street types - you can attempt to pick a date working through from the early 19th to the mid-20th century - which account for a very high proportion of London homes. Just worry about the infill opportunities in lots of those and do not get too dragged into the middle of block structures and other complex situations.

That would be my, I hope, helpful advice, with apologies to Elliot [Kemp] and Rob [McNicol] if that is overly critical. It is not meant in that spirit. I hope that is helpful.

Murad Qureshi AM: Thank you, Nicholas, for covering the new design code aspect of the SPG. I was going to ask you. I should let my colleague Tony [Devenish AM] and then Nicky [Gavron AM] in.

Tony Devenish AM: Nicholas [Boys Smith], it is great to see you as always. I do not expect an answer now; maybe you can write to us from our two sessions today both on the high street regeneration and how we can move things fast and here on tall buildings if there is anything you can put in terms of best practice with actual case studies. I am not interested in lots of waffle. It is the case studies of what a particular BID or council or developer or community has achieved. Reference my previous discussion earlier - I know you were not on - with Jules [Pipe] at the beginning of the meeting.

Nicholas Boys Smith (Founding Director, Create Streets): Sorry, that is on high streets, is it? Sorry, just to check I understand, Tony.

Tony Devenish AM: High street regeneration and in terms of what we are discussing now.

Nicholas Boys Smith (Founding Director, Create Streets): Fine, OK.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): Yes, just on the SPG, the SPG I was referring to earlier was the one that is mentioned under the play section of the London Plan, which talks about providing guidance for the 10 square metres and all that. That is actually written in the text of the London Plan and that was the one I was referring to as an SPG.

As far as tall buildings are concerned, this Committee has done a response to the Good Quality Housing SPG. We felt quite strongly that there should be separate document on tall buildings, a separate SPG with more detail, more case studies and examples of how the same density can be reconfigured in different urban forms. We think that because there are different kinds of tall buildings. There are hotels and it is not just all residential. There is student accommodation and so on. Also, the policy itself: the London Plan overall is fantastic, but I do regret that we still have a policy that is for all kinds of tall buildings. It does not separate out commercial from residential. I thought we now have an opportunity, and it was mentioned at the examination-in-public, that we should provide some kind of guidance on tall buildings in particular, sort of separate perhaps from the housing SPG. Anyway, I just wanted to plug what the Committee has put into you, Jules [Pipe CBE].

Murad Qureshi AM: Thanks, Nicky. I have just a final aspect of the SPG, which we should not lose sight of. Given the increasing constraints that our colleagues in the local boroughs work under, what additional support can we help boroughs with in implementing the SPG? Jules [Pipe CBE]? Elliot [Kemp}?

Elliot Kemp (Principal Strategic Planner, Greater London Authority): One of the points of the guidance was to try to enable boroughs to be able to do site capacity and housing design as simply as possible. We have proposed the sketch-up tool in there, which is pretty straightforward for people to use. We will be looking at other ways to maybe use new digital technology to make that even simpler, potentially an adaptation of the PRiSM tool, which I know that you would be aware of, that housing land have developed. Potentially, in the future we could make it even easier to do site capacity work. They are the things we are trying to make simpler. We will be working with boroughs to explain the policy and help train them up, and also partners like Urban Design London (UDL) are doing lots of good work in terms of explaining the policy and explaining how to implement them. We will be working with them in the coming months as well.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): Thank you. We have run over time and so I am particularly grateful to our guests for staying so long to answer the questions that we needed to ask. We will be following up with some of our guests with some written questions that we would have liked to ask you today but time did not permit. Thank you very much for all your contributions. It was a very interesting session that Londoners will be interested in.

Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Sorry, Chair, may I just take this opportunity that I would not otherwise get to say farewell to Nicky [Gavron AM] - and Navin [Shah AM] as well - but because it is the Planning [and Regeneration] Committee particularly Nicky for decades, not just years, of contribution to forming planning policy across London.

Nicky Gavron AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much, Jules. I still want to stay involved one way and another.

Murad Qureshi AM: Hear, hear. Hear, hear.

Andrew Boff AM (Chair): I have this feeling that because she will not be on the Assembly does not mean we will not be hearing from her.