Appendix 1

Planning Committee

10 June 2014

Transcript Item 7: Tall Building’s and London’s Skyline

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): If we could just start with each of you telling us who you are, it is as much for us as for the webcast as well.

Rowan Moore (architecture critic, The Observer): I am Rowan Moore. I am the architecture critic of The Observer and I am one of the people who initiated The Observer and Architects Journal’s Skyline campaign.

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): Tony Pidgley, Chairman of Berkeley Group, the developer responsible for some of the taller buildings in London.

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, MBA): Julia Barfield of Marks Barfield Architects. I am responsible for the London Eye among other things and an architect in London.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): Peter Rees, Professor of Places and City Planning at University College London and former City Planning Officer at the City of London.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): I am Sunand Prasad. I am an architect. I am also co-founder of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), during which time I was involved in looking at tall buildings currently in practice.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, GLA): Edward Lister. I am the Deputy Mayor responsible for Planning, so the operation of the London Plan and the processing of that come under my area of responsibility.

Stewart Murray (Assistant Director – Planning, GLA): Stewart Murray, the Greater London Authority Assistant Director of Planning.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): Sorry, I should have said that I am also a member of the Mayor’s Design Advisory Group.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): That is important. Thank you for providing that. I would like to add that Julia [Barfield] is responsible for the wheel, or the London Eye, as you call it.

Peter Murray, I would like you to introduce this topic for us and to kick off with a first question, which Steve [O’Connell] is going to ask. But if you would just introduce yourself, Peter, and tell us a little bit about why you are here.,

Peter Murray (Chairman, New London Architecture): I am Chairman of New London Architecture (NLA) and we are the centre for debate and discussion about issues to do with the built environment in London, with a regular series of debates about issues of concern.

We have a large model of central London in our premises in Store Street where we put little models of proposals and buildings that have planning permission. I started to notice over the last year or so that we had more little models going onto the larger model that were taller than one might say had previously been there. We saw these popping up, as you might say, in Nine Elms, the City of London, Canary Wharf, South Quay, Stratford and along the South Bank, so I thought it was worth investigating.

We looked into the issue and we came up with some research which showed that there were some 237 towers in the system at the moment; and we thought it was worth doing an exhibition about this, just to show people what was going on. It was clear that many people were not aware of the scale of changes that were happening in London. Clearly, within City Hall, people knew that. Outside we did not, and we thought that it was part of our role as London’s centre for the built environment that we should tell people what was happening. We commissioned models. We commissioned views. We put an exhibition together which gives people a really clear picture of the scale of the issue we face.

Our position is that we actually think tall buildings are good, that they are necessary and that well-designed both in terms of the skyline and in terms of how they hit the ground in the right place they are a very good addition to London’s built environment. We would encourage buildings of high quality where we can. In that context we have raised a debate, which is very healthy for London, to ensure that as we meet the huge growth requirement of London over the next few decades, we create a city we can all be proud of.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Good. Steve.

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): Yes, thank you very much. I am really pleased we are covering this very significant issue and, as an introductory piece, we would like to investigate the drivers of the significant changes you have just referred to; the scale of the change and in essence, as the Chair mentioned earlier, why now as opposed to five, ten or 20 years ago and where, and define what we mean by a tall building. There are definitions but there seems to be some flexing around the definitions and I would like people’s opinions around the definition of what is a tall building. That sets the scene for a debate a little bit later.

So, initially I am happy for anyone to come in, but certainly I would look forward to something from Tony, Peter [Rees] and Sir Edward on this one. In those parameters, who would like to pipe up first?

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): I do not think the debate is about tall buildings. It is about numbers and the density that we so desperately need in London. It is a right for everybody to have a home. Equally, though, the public realm and what you make of the place and how you treat the place is important to it. If you look at what we do - and we have been looking at the density and unfortunately I did not get the papers until Friday night,

so I do not have as many facts as I would like - but if you take a lot of these big council estates we have pulled down, they are dense. Kidbrooke or Woodbury had 2,000 units and we have now put back 5,000 and have doubled the public open space. We run Market and Opinion Research International (MORI) tests of them and families are wishing to live in them. People do want to live in them. They are good for London. They are good for the economy.

I talked to Nicky [Gavron] about it when she asked me to make some points. We bought 1 Blackfriars, which is a very large tower, from the receiver. We talked to the local community and we talked to the local authority about the planning. Nobody wanted to change it. They thought it was architecturally a very pleasing building and I would say to everybody here today ‘architecture’ is always going to be in the eye of the beholder. We gave a cheque upfront when we got planning for £29 million to the London Borough of Southwark. We do not know what they have done to it. We understand it was for the Aylesbury Estate. It creates 200 permanent full-time jobs for London. We invested as Berkeley under the planning £680,000 in training and employment for young people, which has been a great success. The local authority gets a further £3 million in Homes Bonus and the stamp duty on the site is £40 million. If you look at the contribution to society on something like that, £70 million is going into creating other homes.

Given that we are the fourth most visited capital city and we are a world-class city, if you take a tower and you build it in isolation and you do not look at its surroundings, it will always be a tower. However you have to look at it in the context of what you are doing with it and how you make the place and how you create homes for people that everybody has a right to have.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Tony, you were not building towers, though, in the 1990s, were you? Why now?

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): Yes, that was the point. Why now? I accept that you are talking about one of the main drivers. Clearly, on the figures I have, something like 80% of the 236 that have been mentioned are residential. That is your field. That is your area. You are saying that the drivers and the pressures on the boroughs and the Mayor to provide residential or affordable residential in other ways is the key point. However, the Chair has just mentioned that ten years ago the same drivers were there.

Kit Malthouse AM: A lot of these sites, though, presumably, you bought quite a long time ago and some of them will have been part of the land bank and now you are building towers just in the last few years.

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): No, it is not as straightforward as that, sorry. 25 years ago when we first came into London, London was not a residential capital then. It was not one of the greatest growing capitals of the world. It has become that over the last 25 years, so there has been a major shift in demand. We should be proud and celebrate the success of London, the jobs it creates and what it is doing at the end of the day. Nicky, we were building towers because the St George Wharf Tower that a lot of people have criticised was approved by you and Ken [Livingstone, former Mayor of London].

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Yes. Sorry, I was going back before that. It was in recent years that the --

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): Towers really came out of the Labour administration in that period because we were sent for, like most other developers, and told, “We have a housing crisis. We need more density”. Yes, we are the developers and look at the density. We have to create the density. In your own town, Croydon, we are building towers and they are affordable and young people are buying them and the test --

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): -- and I am delighted that you are Tony.

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): Thank you. The test is always simple with me. The best test of all of this is: do the public buy them? I know we are going to have a debate in a minute about whether it is for Asia or not, but that is fine. We can have that as well. At the end of the day, Croydon, which is a London suburb, is sold to the British, not to investors, but young people at prices that are affordable that allows them to get on the housing ladder. We lose sight of that in this debate. Yes, we have four square miles in London. I will be the first to admit we have a lot of international investment in and it used to be two and it is now four and I suspect that with the popularity alone it will continue to grow.

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): OK. That is great. Thank you. So, Peter, there is an iron logic there that there is a housing need, and tall buildings are absolutely necessary and will deliver that shortage of housing. Do you agree?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): There is one thing I agree with Tony on and that is the fact that this is more to do with land use than tall buildings. We need a little bit of history. British and American governments of both parties have spent over a generation stigmatising rented housing and the idea that if you did not own your own home you were not a stakeholder in society. That has had big implications. If you look at successful cities on the Continent - Paris, Vienna, Berlin - the majority of people rent their homes. That makes the population much more flexible and you get much higher use of residential accommodation. When people own their homes in big cities, they are generally relatively rich people. They travel a lot. They are not in a lot. They are out doing other things and the actual land use you get out of people home-owning in the centre of a great city is much lower than where you have rental.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): I believe that is one of the first things we have to look at. London is, if you like, at the pinnacle of the results of that sort of strategy. London has, therefore, because it cannot accommodate all of the people who would like to live here, had rapidly escalating residential prices. That has attracted an international wave of investment that has looked at residential property as a commodity rather than as a utility. We have large amounts of money coming from Russia, China and the Middle East into London to buy apartments simply as safe deposit boxes, as investment opportunities. Therefore, where I would disagree with Tony [Pidgley] is that in most of these cases we are not

building homes at all. We are trying to appeal to that market by building towers because the one thing that does appeal in this international market is glitzy high-rise buildings.

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): Tony [Pidgley] is talking about clusters. Clusters can be suburban clusters and they can be somewhere like Croydon. Your logic is, you are saying, that the majority of those high-rises in Croydon - or it may be Kingston - are going to be from investors? I find that hard to believe.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): It changes as you move out from London, but certainly it is the case along the riverbank in the centre of London. Certainly it is the case around the City of London. If the City of London had not resisted the Government’s proposal for automatic change of use from offices to residential which came in a couple of years ago, the City would now be losing its offices rapidly. Most of the offices in Croydon have already disappeared. I am not talking about empty ones; I am talking about full ones that have been decanted for residential conversion.

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): There may be the figures in my notes or Sir Edward’s [Lister] that may or may not count or confirm the actual numbers of foreign investors. I do not have those in front of me. Perhaps others do. Your logic in talking about how clearly rented accommodation is more prolific abroad still does not necessarily explain the fact that there is the demand and they are selling out. It may or may not be to foreign investors. It is fact. We have the demand, the demographic change and the increasing population. Are you saying that that increase in population’s residential needs can be met by non-high-rise?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): Absolutely. You can create much higher density by not building towers. The highest density residential area in London is Chelsea. It does not have towers. If you look at the sort of buildings that were being put up by the Greater London Council (GLC) in the 1970s in Vauxhall Bridge Road, for instance, by Darbourne and Darke, which is a wonderful little estate in the centre of Covent Garden, you have buildings of no more than eight storeys high creating much higher densities than you create with a tower in the middle of a lot of wasted space. The other thing is you fill out the block and create good space in the centre. A doughnut is far better than a tower if you want to build high-density living and it will appeal to the actual people who need homes in the homes market in London, rather than the international investment market.

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): This is good. This is fine. I know if my colleague Andrew Boff [AM] were here, he would be chiming with those thoughts because of his aspiration for more family homes. If I could move to Sir Edward, we have heard different views here. As the overarching planning authority for London, we have seen a significant increase in applications in those, of course. That is a fact. Would you like to comment on the reasons as to why now, as opposed to previously?

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): And the where.

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): We will get to the where in a minute.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, GLA): I would like to, if I may, just put it a little bit into context. The Mayor’s Office - and this is whether it has been Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson - has supported the concept of tall buildings in London. That has been a consistent policy from the very first edition of the London Plan, so there is nothing new in policy terms. It has always been here and it has not changed, just to make that absolutely clear. There is an explicit support for tall buildings. What there is in the London Plan is explicit support for tall buildings in clusters and the areas in which they should go. Nobody is suggesting that you put tall buildings everywhere. What is being said is that tall buildings are ideally suited in certain cluster locations - Canary Wharf, Vauxhall, Nine Elms, Elephant and Castle, Blackfriars Bridge Road, Old Oak Common and I can go on - specific areas where --

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): The Opportunity Area Frameworks, yes?

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, GLA): Basically Opportunity Areas, but not all Opportunity Areas. It would be wrong to assume all Opportunity Areas are tall building areas. That is not necessarily the case.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): There are 38, are there not?

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, GLA): There are 38 Opportunity Areas, but not all of them for tall buildings. All of them are for fairly high densities and this is where I do agree with Peter Rees. Density can be achieved but in different ways. It is not just tall buildings that create density. It is just that there are some parts of London we think are suited to tall buildings and therefore we support that in those areas. Let me just put that one down. The second one is where, Peter, if you will forgive me, I do disagree with you about overseas buyers. Yes, there are overseas buyers. There have always been overseas buyers. Be very careful on the definition of ‘overseas buyers’. An overseas buyer could be, for example, somebody from Ireland. They are overseas buyers, so these definitions are very dangerous definitions to be using. Yes, you have certain buildings in central London which have always attracted very high prices. They are very much the homes of the very, very rich. That has always been true in certain parts of zone 1. That has not changed. It just happened that they were very rich English people once upon a time and they now tend to be very rich overseas people; but the fact is they were never actually properties that were easily obtainable by the average purchaser. They were never ones that they went for. We estimate that the number of properties sold to foreign nationals has been running at about 3% for the last 20 years. In total numbers terms, it is true that that shot up post-2008 because nobody could get a mortgage, the property market switched off and it was only overseas money that continued to flow. That is, we believe, correcting itself back again to that sort of run rate of about 3%, which I would suggest to you is not that meaningful a number when you go across it.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Eddie, could I just interrupt? That is 3% of all residential?

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, GLA): Of all residential.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): What about the towers and the skyscrapers?

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, GLA): We do not have that number. We cannot identify where they actually --

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): That is what we are talking about now.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, GLA): We cannot get down into that kind of detail to know. We did a quick survey for three months from March to May of all the tower applications coming through City Hall. By the way, may I just pick up the definition point? Our definition in City Hall is we measure everything over 30 metres across London or 150 metres in the City as being our definition of ‘tall’. That, of course, is not necessarily that tall because you do get areas like Chelsea where, say, they are eight storeys. That would be 20-25 metres in height, so just be careful about definitions of this. I am just giving you the definition we use in planning, which is fundamentally 30 metres.

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): That was my point of bringing it up at the beginning of the meeting. You have a definition within the London Plan, but clearly you have applications coming in to you that are beyond that and that you would have a discretion around approving.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, GLA): Yes, that can vary from 30 metres all the way through to the Shard, so that is the range that is in place. I wanted just to pick up my March to May figure. We did a quick survey and in my definition of tall towers there were 11,500 residential units involved. Of these, 3,000 were affordable or very close to 25% and there was a further £26 million paid to boroughs in offsite housing arrangements. There were also section 106s for all sorts of other things as well, but we have not tried to capture that in that analysis. I hope that sort of gives you a bit of a flavour. A last point: it is about population. We are growing at the rate of about 100,000 people a year. That is the run rate. We believe the run rate will drop off and we believe it will drop back to about 70,000 or 75,000. We hope it will drop back to that. We believe it will as people start to move back out of London and they were stopped by moving out of London, basically, by the recession. We think that will resume, although of course it is worth making the point that the stamp duty costs are now such that moving home is a very expensive process. Of course, that is slowing down any kind of movement by people.

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): My last point, then, is that Sir Edward’s comment is about the height, so there is a parameter for applications within the Mayor’s Office. Is there a general view that there is flexibility? Should there be a cap or should there not be a cap or are you relaxed about height, and they should be as high as they should be? Does anyone have any particularly strong opinions on that?

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): If I can come in, we are losing sight of it. It is about place-making. We have MORI - so it is independent of us - check the happiness of people in towers. I brought it with me today and you are welcome to see it. It says 80% of people are happy about the places. If you go to any of the big estates we do, yes, there are towers in the hub and towers should go around transport hubs. That is where they should be. That is where density should be and they should be in clusters. However, as you come out of some of these estates, we still have the family houses, so it is finding a balance. We still need

the parks. We can answer the question on the numbers of foreign buyers that are here, but what we are finding is fascinating us. There is a change going on that none of us are discussing. We are seeing families wanting to live in towers. There is a move and a shift in London. They are aspiring to live in towers and all our statistics and information, which you can have and check, have found that. It is lifestyle, it is culture, it is what we have to offer in this city and it comes out.

If you go to the way we look at it, we adopted a policy 12 months ago because we were conscious of it. We went to Asia, if that is the right expression, but we pretty much sell all over the world as a group. Really what happens is 30%, by and large, at any of our large sites goes to affordable housing. There is a variety of tenures. We have just received planning at 1 London Dock, as we call it, with 1,800 units and 30% of that is affordable. That is in Tower Hamlets. We have another big site in there that is just going through the process and 30% is affordable. That leaves 60%. Of the 60%, 30% of that goes to what we call - and it is word that Sir Ed [Lister] touched on - ‘international’. Because the developers are being lazy, everyone says 50%. It is not 50%. It is half of what is left. A third always goes to the British market. The debate is, when you look at the other third, is it Irish? Are they here as an international on work? We cannot have the greatest city in the world and invite people to come and work here and to be the financial centre of the world and then tell people they cannot buy homes. We are analysing at the moment and trying to get under it. Yes, in the two square miles, it has always been there. We have a site in Belgravia. Probably 40% of it has gone. The Russians have just left, by the way, whatever the rights or wrongs, but we have some Russian oligarchs in there. We live in the market every day. We also have a lot of international people. They are running banks and doing jobs. You measure it.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Peter, you have not said anything on why you think they are popping up now and you have done a lot of research on this.

Peter Murray (Chairman, New London Architecture): Yes, we are facing a perfect storm really. We have obviously - and some of these things have been mentioned - a housing shortage, we have massive population growth, we have high land values particularly in the centre of London and we have a wave of overseas investment. We also have the fact that actually, as Tony [Pidgley] said, people like tall buildings now. That is very different to the 1960s. They are aspirational and are seen as places people want to live. Also, on the other side of the fence, you have local authorities who are keen to negotiate under section 106 and the affordable housing that comes with that sort of scale of development. You also have the --

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Do you think the boroughs are driving it?

Peter Murray (Chairman, New London Architecture): It is part of that.

Kit Malthouse AM: I wanted to ask about that. That was part of my question. I wanted to ask about the role of the viability test and the various burdens that are placed on development. Tony, if you did not have to do the section 106, the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) and even the affordable housing proportion and if it was just straight housing for London, presumably every item that the local authority negotiates with you puts another few storeys on

the building to pay for it and, indeed, is about how you configure it and who you sell the apartments to.

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): There is no easy answer. You have to remember I come at it from a pure developer’s point of view. 25 years ago by accident we found Asia and I can tell you about the day. I can remember where it was. It was the Channel 4 building and it is 12 storeys. It is not 19 and it is not 18 but it is still 12 storeys. At the end of the day, I still say it is about demand and place-making and the aspirations of people. I wish somebody could show me and we run workshops all the time. You have to remember the scrutiny in this country because of the democracy we have with local residents and sometimes we have as many as seven residents’ associations. We have an open policy on this. We move into a site, we open it up and you can come and debate it with us, so all of these go through due process. We had one of the national papers write an article about one of the schemes we are doing. The best defence was the residents, unprompted by us. We are thinking what we are going to do. They want these places. They want this space. They want the local facilities. That is the test of any democracy. So, if you want the density and provided it is thought through carefully, it is right. However, going back to something Peter [Rees] said, as you move down the river and I have had a chance to check some of the statistics but not all of them, if you go to Kew, it is fascinating. It is opposite Kew Gardens. You think it is international. We are building on the bridge there. That is 80% to an English market and now we are dissecting the 20%. We have to be careful we do not get carried away with, “What is the international market?” Again --

Kit Malthouse AM: --So, Tony, is Peter [Rees] right that the type of apartment that you build attracts a certain market so that the two-bedroom standard apartment in Paddington Basin or at Battersea Power Station is basically what the international market wants. If you built something that was configured differently, then you would get a different demand from overseas. For instance, you are building houses with gardens at Kidbrooke Village. Is there as much international interest? I understand it is a different location, but would there be as much international interest in houses as there is in two-bedroom apartments?

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): This is what the question really boils down to, where we are with the tall buildings. I would never disagree with somebody like Peter [Rees]. The reality is, the minute you move out to those big regeneration sites, you do not see that international demand and we certainly do not have it down in Kidbrooke. It is going to an English market. Where you have to be careful about it is that there are a lot of foreign employees in this country who live in Blackheath who will buy them, but they are not flying in from Asia and buying them as investments. If you get into the rental market, which is where I disagree with Peter, respectfully again, I never see any of these apartments empty. You are all going to say they are and we are going to say they are not and the only way we can check that - and we have done it and I think you know this, Kit, because we shared it with your office - is by the electricity bills because, if they are burning electricity, they are occupied. We have been challenged on that recently because they say the staff are in there, so of course you are right, but by and large those properties are rented and they make up part of the London rental market and have done for the last 20 years. It is only just now that we are starting to look at rental,

which I agree with. We did the first scheme with the Government on it. However, my answer is that I disagree with Peter about it.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We will get on to that. I have notes from the audience. Tony, just one last question on this - you are shortly at South Quay. You have permission. Do you have permission?

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): No.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): It is supposed to be 73 storeys. You told me about 65. Who is going to live in that?

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): It is very interesting at South Quay. It is in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and most developers say it is a difficult borough in which to operate. We always look at the policies very carefully as a developer, as you would expect us to. Their policy is 30% key worker. We like to call it ‘key worker’ because it is a balancing mix. That scheme has 30%. It is onsite. They like it onsite. The public open space is trebled from what the original scheme we are pulling down has. They like that. The debate goes on about it. If the buildings are too tight and there is no space around them, they do become wind tunnels. If you open them up and they can breathe and there is public space around them and you lift them off the ground, as we do, they are different. Now, that does not have planning. I cannot speak for the Committee today because it has to go through a democracy. However, certainly from the point of view of what the locals want and what the people want, the scheme and the place today has a fair amount to do. It is a mixed tenure scheme. It is mixed use. It has offices in it. It has all sorts of facilities for the people who are going to live there. As far as we are concerned if you asked us, judging our statistics, “Where is it going to go”; it is going to be sold to the young professionals of Canary Wharf. You have to be careful about the expression ‘the aspiration of what people want’, so that will predominantly go into an English market. I cannot say that 20% of it might not go abroad as investments but I hope that answers it for you.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We have strayed a lot, so in this section we have said quite a lot about housing. We have said a bit about density. I want to now hand over to Tom, who is going to explore the whole area of how far these tall buildings and skyscrapers are meeting the housing need.

Tom Copley AM: Thank you, Chair. I was quite conflicted about this because, aesthetically speaking, I quite like skyscrapers, except for the horrible Walkie Talkie that we have to look at over the river. The real question - and it is what Sunand raised earlier - is whether or not they are meeting housing need and particularly the needs of low and middle-income Londoners. First of all, Tony, I was intrigued by what you said about this opinion polling showing that people are aspiring to live in towers. All the polling I have seen in the past says that the vast majority of people want to live in low-rise housing with gardens. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, first of all.

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): MORI only did this in 2014 and 80% of Londoners aspire to live in towers. You have to be careful about the --

Tom Copley AM: --What was the question that they put?

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): What was the question Matt (male speaker in gallery)?

Male Speaker: I think it was about (inaudible) -- New London Architecture (NLA), is it not, Peter?

Peter Murray (Chairman, New London Architecture): Yes. We did a survey to ask people about towers generally. We found that 30% of people did not particularly like towers, 30% of people were perfectly happy about towers and 30% who really liked them. That was the general impression.

Tom Copley AM: What about living in them?

Peter Murray (Chairman, New London Architecture): On actually living in them, I do not have those statistics in front of me at the moment, but if you refer to the NLA, there is a link to our site which has all that information on it.

Tom Copley AM: It would be good to see the statistics. Like I say, the things that I have seen suggest that the vast majority of people do not want to live in tall buildings. They want to live in a house with a garden. Peter, perhaps you could talk a bit about this whole issue of whether or not towers are going to be a solution to the housing crisis.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): I should declare an interest. I live on the 27th floor of the Heron in the City, so for about six months I have lived in a tower block, but I live there seven days a week and it is my only home. I do not believe that that kind of residential occupation creates or sustains communities. It creates much more isolation. It is fine for people who are rich enough to get out and escape and go into the community and do other things and who have the money to do that. It is not so good for people who are on low incomes, stuck in a high building, feeling isolated and not able to get out to the same degree. If you build developments of up to ten storeys, people meet each other a lot more. They are in contact with the ground a lot more. They create community a lot more. They use local facilities a lot more. Once you stick people further away from the ground, the tendency is to come down the tower, get into a car and drive off somewhere else.

Tom Copley AM: I have heard that argument put many times. Is there quantifiable evidence on this particular issue about the effect on communities and people’s attitudes?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): You can see it in terms of the estates that were built, as you say, in the 1960s and look at the local facilities that there are around high-rise developments in comparison with the facilities you have underneath and around the lower-rise ones. Just walking through them you feel a greater sense of

community. We did a very interesting piece for BBC London on television a couple of weeks back comparing what is happening at Vauxhall with what had happened in the 1970s in Vauxhall Bridge Road. Talking to the residents in Vauxhall Bridge Road and saying to them, “How do you compare this with what is on the other side of the river”, they said, “This is a place. We are talking about 70 and 80-year-old women who were there enjoying the space in the middle of the block where they lived. They understood the difference, so people do generally perceive a difference between what you would call ‘neighbourhood’ and what you would call ‘development.

Tom Copley AM: What about, just exploring this a bit further, the international comparison? If you take Manhattan, for example, which is very high-rise, do they have problems with community and things like that as well?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): To a degree, but, again, they have a much greater proportion of rented accommodation, especially in midtown in New York. There is much more transience anyway and it is much more a case of accommodating people for relatively short periods. The problem with the lack of community tends to be much more acute where people own apartments. So, as I said earlier, there is a huge degree of underuse and emptiness. I know that for the block that I live in, 50% of the block was sold off-plan in Hong Kong. The people who are living there in the City, we insisted that half of them were studio flats because the smaller flats do tend to have better occupation than the large ones. In those cases, they are mainly occupied by the children of the rich overseas buyers who are studying in London, so it becomes a sort of student hall of residence. I am not sure whether that could not be more efficiently managed elsewhere, rather than taking up housing units.

Tom Copley AM: Sunand, do you want to come in on this? You raised this as an issue.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): Yes. The London Plan has a very well thought out matrix of housing densities which relates to public transport, accessibility levels (PTALs), location and all sorts of things. If you look at that matrix, all but the very densest part of that can easily be met without building tall. The argument that you have to build tall to meet London’s housing targets just does not wash. Actually, it is demonstrably untrue. There are other reasons for building tall and there will be sites, especially those identified at the top right of the matrix, the central areas and the best PTAL and all those things, where you might well need to build taller than, say, eight or nine storeys. You would want 20 or 25. Beyond that, building tall has other reasons and it relates quite strongly to Kit’s [Malthouse] point about viability. First of all, it costs more to build above about 15 storeys and there is as much as a 50% premium on that. However, if you can sell that for twice or three times more, then you would be able to sell them and get the return from other lower-down for sale or for affordable, that obviously helps the viability. Here the overseas investor market has played a very strong part, so I do not think we can deny that, but --

Tom Copley AM: Is that why it is happening?

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): It seems to me logical that if we are reliant on the private sector to provide affordable housing, in their viability calculations, given that that is the available opportunity today, that will happen and actually the ability to build tall and to let at far higher, whether it is English buyers or overseas buyers living in England. It is a nuanced thing and it can be a bit of a red herring, this whole conversation about where they come from. The key point is --

Tom Copley AM: Property speculation in general, yes?

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): -- the tops of those buildings have higher costs and higher values and that is what is driving it. It is not the kind of general myth that we need to build tall because we are out of space. That just is not true. You can do it almost geometrically. You can show a plot. What Tony [Pidgley] says about public open space I completely understand. If you build tall, you will create more public open space, without question. It is whether that is a better arrangement or having that space more shared or more atomised or more owned. There are courtyards and you talked about doughnuts, for example. There are many models which, in all but the very densest developments densities, can be fulfilled without going much higher than eight, nine or ten storeys. We are talking about Notting Hill or Maida Vale. Those are 200 units to the hectare and it is only above 250 units or so that you will really start to need to go higher. There are many ways of going higher as well and we should move on from the idea that it is an answer to housing density. It may be an answer to other things, but it is not an answer to housing need.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Do you mind if we just come in and ask something about viability because it was asked before? The Government has redefined viability now, so it is all about competitive returns. When you made that point about the higher you go, the higher the value, it also must mean that there is more money coming in for the investor who is going high.

Kit Malthouse AM: And for the local authority and for --

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Yes, and, as long as some of that comes back into the public purse, for the public purse. However, very often, not everyone is a Tony Pidgley.

Stewart Murray (Assistant Director – Planning, GLA): The London Plan is very specific in that, reflecting the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and guidance and viability assessments, each development would normally be required to make a contribution towards affordable housing, sustainability objectives, various transport packages and public realm improvements. An independent viability assessment is undertaken to scrutinise the developers’ own and thatis put forward as an open-book exercise. Whether one goes higher and achieves higher values, and therefore creates more viability in a particular tall building, which therefore potentially unlocks more affordable housing and contributes to more public realm improvements, more public transport improvements and public benefits overall, might be difficult to quantify. However, increasingly in the Opportunity Areas in London - and you mentioned some like over on the South Bank and examples like Vauxhall, Nine Elms and Battersea - one of the big objectives in the Opportunity Area Planning Framework was to achieve a very large, long, linear park. Obviously, that restricts the footprint for development,

but there is a public benefit there which is being paid for by the developers with a tariff coming off the viability of those schemes, as well as affordable housing and paying for the Northern Line Extension.

Kit Malthouse AM: This is my point. If you take a tower and turn it into a bar chart and colour the slots, this bit will pay for the park and this bit is paying for the social housing and this bit pays for the section 106 and this bit pays for the CIL and contributions to Crossrail, you can sort of slice it up.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, GLA): If I may, Chair, make the point, it is true of all buildings in London, not just tall buildings. We require a percentage of affordable housing. We require various section 106 and CIL contributions. That is true of everything and that, of course, is driving costs. It is one of the reasons property is so expensive in London. It is all to do with numbers.

Kit Malthouse AM: Is it also the case that the high value of land obviously goes into the viability test as well? Given that you have a viability test on a development, it is almost impossible for a developer to lose money because they will just say, “The viability does not work, so tell you what. You have to give me an extra ten storeys if you want all of this stuff because I have paid this for the land”.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, GLA): If you do not mind me saying so, the alternative is true. If you push them too much, nothing gets built, which is exactly what was happening post 2008. Absolutely everything was virtually at a standstill because nothing was viable and there are still parts of London which are not viable today.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): That was rather a different time, though, Eddie. Can we just bring in Julia?

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, GLA): It is true today.

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, MBA): Yes. I just wanted to build on what Sunand [Prasad] said and it is not really a point about tall or not, but actually who provides our affordable housing. There seems to be an assumption that it has to be a developer that provides it, around the back of the development on another site, probably to a lesser quality than the original development, creating divisions in society. I wonder whether the public sector should not actually step up to the mark - just as we did after the war when debt levels were four or five times higher than they are now - and build the kind of housing that Peter [Rees] was talking about. That was built at a time when it was the public sector that was responsible for building the affordable housing. Then it could be mixed housing with blind tenancies. It could be properly mixed communities. I know it is slightly off the subject, but it sort of begs the question. If they are having to go high in order to pay for social housing, why is the funding structure not changed?

Tom Copley AM: I would agree with the point about more funding from the public sector, but specifically on the private sector, surely it should be contributing as well.

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, MBA): Yes, absolutely.

Tom Copley AM: Is there not an issue as well? Tony [Pidgley] talked about the development in Tower Hamlets where we have the onsite affordable housing, which is great. However, is it not the case that a lot of these developments have offsite affordable housing and that is not in compliance with the NPPF or the London Plan, both of which stress the need for mixed communities?

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, MBA): Yes, exactly.

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): The challenge is the public sector. We are not pulling down estates that are 20 years old because they were maintained and they were safe places to live in and walk about at night. They were no-go areas. We never discussed those. The Ferrier Estate, as some of you must know, you could not walk around. It was a complete no-go area. It was built 20 years ago by a very famous architect who designed it and won every award there was, but nobody maintained it. The same applies to Woodbury. We have two others we are about to start where the same applies. This is a question of getting the facts right and understanding. We build our affordable housing and you cannot tell the difference on our sites. It is exactly the same specification externally. We may not put gold taps in the bath and I am happy to accept that, but we ought to discuss as well whether we are maintaining these estates. Are they getting longevity? Are they safe places to live? There is too much myth about society. If you do not make places today, we do not sell them. If it is not a nice place to go, it will not happen. If you take St George Wharf Tower, Nicky, you and Ken [Livingstone, former Mayor of London] negotiated that with us.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): John Prescott [former Deputy Prime Minister and First Secretary of State] called it in, actually.

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): Yes, quite right, but you actually had - and I checked it - 389 affordable units on the riverfront down there and we did not put them in the tower because it was the best value for the public sector, which Ken negotiated. OK, it was called in and Mr Prescott wanted to do that, but that is another debate. It was good value for the public sector and so you are right. If they are not affordable, perhaps the tower comes down.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): Can we just get this clear? Affordable housing does not have to be a charitable gift. Affordable housing can be profitable, marginally profitable. It will not be as profitable as the glitzy high-rise stuff, admittedly, but look at what Pocket Living is achieving around London within ten minutes’ walk of Tube stations in zones 1 and 2. That is profitable affordable housing.

Kit Malthouse AM: But Peter, it depends on what you pay for the land right?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): The value of the land depends on planning permission --

Kit Malthouse AM: -- because there is a possibly of a tower, so land speculation is now driving values up because people think that they can get a 20, 30 or 40-storey tower, which means then the viability of mid-level housing becomes negative.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, GLA): I come back to the point that in the London Plan we have identified those places which are suitable for tall buildings. It is also a point that we are not saying all of London is suitable for tall buildings and, indeed, tall buildings only account for about 10% of construction, so let us put it back into context. It is not being built everywhere. People can choose whether they want to live in a tall building or not. That is a market choice which people make.

Kit Malthouse AM: That is right. Sorry to interrupt. I understand that. My constituency has a particular concern. It is not Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea. There is permission for these two towers at Chelsea, unfortunately. The fact that we have a cluster going up at Nine Elms, it is not in Westminster, but it looms over the whole thing. If you are in Belgravia, you can see that - I was about to be rude - Prescott tower at Nine Elms, which is now going to be a cluster, compounding in my view the error. You can see that wherever you are now in Belgravia or Pimlico, so everybody lives with it.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We will come on to that when we talk about heritage. Tom, are you going to complete the housing section?

Tom Copley AM: Yes, I was coming to the end anyway because we have been talking about this for quite some time. The only thing I really wanted Tony to come back on, actually, was the whole point about the economics of whether you build tall or whether you do low-rise. Sunand [Prasad] was saying you can achieve the density with low-rise. From your point of view, is it just that it is more profitable to build tall?

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): We are a public company, so we are always going to face up to the fact that we want to be profitable in the risks we take, so we accept that and we accept the criticism of it. We are not worried about that. Equally, though, we spend our life as an organisation trying to get the balance of a community right and trying to look at what the community wants. However, what is interesting about this - and I have two views about this - is that the London Commission looked at it. It was well considered and we should build around hubs and clusters. I can accept that. Nicky [Gavron], you kindly asked me how many of the sites. We have 65 sites in London today in construction. Of those sites only 9 buildings, so it is not that many when you have a look at the amount we have going on, are over 20 storeys. You may say 20 storeys are too much and I would accept it. At the end of the day, you can move the argument away as you wish to move it away. We run workshops on this six days a week and you are very happy. If somebody can show me how we can - and it is a right to have a home, I actually believe - get these densities in London because it is not the builders at the moment. It is the bureaucracy to get the planning through the system we want. If you go back and look at maybe Prescott, you may be right. The reality is the public sector took 400 - in the round - affordable houses sitting on the riverfront. We are all learning about place- making and architecture. You see, where I come from we should celebrate it. We have a world-

class city. The jobs are there. It is an economic force for good what is going on and it is creating jobs. I believe that the recovery is driven by place-making and housing.

Tom Copley AM: Just quickly to end, can I just ask very quickly? If the Mayor came in suddenly and said, “We are going to have big restrictions and we are going to cut down to low and medium-rise housing”, would that mean fewer units being built in London per year?

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): Yes.

Tom Copley AM: Would the other members of the panel accept that?

Kit Malthouse AM: It is a different question. Would it mean fewer units available to Londoners?

Tom Copley AM: That is a better question, Kit, yes.

Kit Malthouse AM: If you were building low-rise, would you get fewer foreign buyers, basically?

Tom Copley AM: Yes. That is a better question.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, GLA): No, that cannot be right. It is still true that the most popular property for foreign buyers is still Kensington and Chelsea in low-rise buildings. I am sorry. That has never changed and it depends on change.

Kit Malthouse AM: It depends on the market. In Kensington and Chelsea, you are absolutely right for the very high end. However, for the mid-level Malaysian or Hong Kong investor, the two-bedroom apartment in St George’s Wharf Tower or here next door or whatever has become - I agree with you, Peter - -

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): --Yes, the West London house has always been a trophy. What we are talking about is yet a new supply of trophy dwellings.

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): Kit, I will leave you with one last thought. We were building on the Albert Embankment and we were encouraged by the London Borough of Lambeth to do it. They came and approached us. We built up the Albert Embankment. We have on that site - and this is why I say we keep continuing on and we are not getting the message across - 50 units that are extra-care which are affordable and which are going to the public sector where senior retired people from London can live. We have to understand this debate more deeply. I am sorry, Nicky [Gavron, Chair], for going on about it because it is where we live every day. That means they will be taken out of three and four- bedroom houses that have gardens that they do not want to live in. We had the shock of our life about this. We first did it in the London Borough of Ealing. We thought that they had bought up there. We were all talking on this. They want to be with their friends. No, they do not. They want the conveniences of life. They want to have an easy way. They do not want to

clean windows and dig gardens. In that scheme, there are 50 - and it has planning - affordable units that are going to one of the registered social landlords (RSLs) and will be managed as senior living.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): How high is this one?

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): It ranges from 15 storeys to 27.

Tom Copley AM: I had not finished. That was very interesting.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): I just have a question from a participant in the audience, who asks what we mean by ‘affordable’. I just thought --

Tom Copley AM: Many things.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Many things. Tom, I thought you might just handle that. When you talk about ‘key workers’, what do you mean, Tony? You said key workers were going to come in.

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): I do not like calling public sector housing ‘affordable’ or ‘social’. That in itself is degrading. Key workers are important to society and we should not leave them behind. We do not want a nurse living two hours from us when we have a heart attack, as I sometimes say. We want her close, so we have to address the issue. We as a group have decided to address it and we will not do (inaudible) sums unless it is a site on the river where it is £3,000 a foot that we have to recognise. Nicky, I do not set the rules. I understand target rents and I am sorry, Peter [Rees], to disagree with you today. I have the highest regard for you, but you cannot build a social unit and make a profit. Everything “affordable” I build - and 30% of what I turn out each year is “affordable” - I lose money on. I have to take it as the bigger part of the equation. It is a risk I am used to taking. It is a risk I understand. You know what the bands are in London, as everybody else does. You cannot build them to the quality that we build them and make a profit. Target rents are target rents --

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): -- When people talk about ‘target rents’, they mean what used to be the old ‘social rent’, which is at about 35% to 40% of your income. Most people who need that sort of rent level have an income of up to about £15,000 a year. ‘Affordable rent’ is up to 80% of market rent and increasingly close to 80% of market rent. Then there is another section of affordable which is ‘part rent/part buy’ or ‘shared ownership’. I will not go into the proportions, but that is what is generally meant. It is in the part under affordability where there is some level of public subsidy. Now we are moving on to offices.

Kit Malthouse AM: Yes. I just wanted to ask a question. As Sir Edward knows, I am not a big fan of tall buildings. I wanted, Peter, to ask you about offices. Obviously, you live in another Prescott error. The Heron was a Prescott decision, was it not?

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): No.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): I live in the Heron, not Heron Tower. Heron Tower is --

Kit Malthouse AM: The Heron is the older part of it?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): No, it is the Shard and the Vauxhall Tower that Mr Prescott had his way with.

Kit Malthouse AM: I thought the Heron Tower was allowed on appeal by Prescott. The City Corporation put the Heron Tower through when you were head of planning?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): Correct, yes, and the other office towers.

Kit Malthouse AM: Would you point to that now and say that was an error in your planning curriculum vitae (CV)?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): Not at all.

Kit Malthouse AM: You said to us it does not work as a community.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): I am sorry. Which one are we talking about? Are we talking about the Heron, the residential building?

Kit Malthouse AM: Either because they were all part of the same deal.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): The residential building I live in, the Heron, was put in amongst an existing cluster of residential towers in the Barbican; and was used as a means of achieving the rebuilding of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the creation of a concert hall and a theatre underneath. The price to be paid for that was a residential tower. As I said, what we tried to do to ensure higher occupancy levels was to have 50% of them as studios, but even with all of that in place and all of the planning game going onsite, there is still considerable under-occupation and overseas investment in it, so it is a good example. However, there was at least a reason for doing it and a justification for doing it there in the middle of an existing cluster, not creating a new cluster.

Kit Malthouse AM: All right. I just wanted to ask you, though, whether you see there is a difference between commercial and residential towers. Obviously you have been responsible for what is possibly the most intrusive cluster in London, but presumably you would differentiate between commercial and residential and would see commercial towers as the answer to the growth in the economy in the future.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): There have been times in the past when people were building office towers speculatively and they ended up sitting empty. The current situation across the river in the Square Mile is that the vacancy rate has now dropped below 7%. The minimum healthy vacancy rate is regarded as 8% to allow

some room for expansion and people to move offices. In the western half of the City it is now below 2%, according to some research that was done before the Smithfield Inquiry earlier this year. That is dangerously low. There are no offices under construction at Canary Wharf, only residential, because it is hugely more profitable than building office buildings. Croydon is losing its office buildings, the occupied ones, to residential conversion. In Westminster, 1.5 million square feet of offices are being lost every year through approved residential conversion in areas like Mayfair. Those occupiers are being pushed eastwards and are coming into the City of London, hence the very low vacancy rate in the western part of the city. There is an undersupply of office accommodation in London because of this temporary existing distortion of the market towards investment residential property. That is why I am so concerned that we are not able to achieve the offices London needs to maintain its economic role; and the sites that should be being developed for offices in areas around the main railway stations for instance, areas with good transport and communications, are being lost to this high-end investment residential property.

Kit Malthouse AM: Do you think that that should or could result in more commercial towers to accommodate growth?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): There are places where you would need to build vertically to accommodate the commercial office accommodation. The reason I say that is you need to have a density of occupation for offices that you can achieve through tall buildings but which is not necessary the case for residential, as we have already heard, because you can group the towers a lot more closely together. You do not have problems of overlooking, problems of privacy and things like that. The other thing is that if you can build a cluster of towers in the city where you have 20 railway stations and seven Underground lines; and there is already an existing mass of occupiers looking for the business synergy that can be achieved by the higher densities, it makes multiple economic successes, as it were.

Kit Malthouse AM: For instance, though, if you were mayor for a day or whatever, would you restrict the ability of Canary Wharf to develop residential and say that it has to be office? Similarly, there is residential under development in the City. Obviously, you live in a residential development in the City, which is a change of policy in the City.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): The City tightened its planning policies during this year and is in the process of finalising that to have stronger protection for existing and potential office floor space within the City; especially bearing in mind what is happening in so many of the surrounding areas. The world’s insurance industry is consolidating within the City at the moment. All the high-rises you see out of the window are being occupied by the insurance sector. Over 80% of the firms in the City of London occupy less than 10,000 square feet. They are small businesses. They are often start- up businesses. Tech City is clustered along the northern edge of the City and, again, Tech City is greatly under threat from residential building at the moment; because all of the new buildings that are going up in that area are, again, these residential towers.

Kit Malthouse AM: Would you restrict the ability to develop residential towers in largely commercial locations?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): I am not saying that we should not build them. We need to find ways of rebalancing the market, which is distorted at the moment. The ready granting of planning permissions, which is exacerbating that distortion of the market, does need to be looked at. It might be that height limits in certain areas would dampen that enthusiasm and would rebalance the equation towards the commercial again. When you see developers turning around and saying, “We do not want to build any offices, even in the City of London. We would prefer to build residential”; and you are having to put planning restrictions in place to prevent the loss of essential offices in the City, then I would imagine that the situation is similar in other areas. I do not have the expertise in those other parts of London, but I can see a need to have similar parallel moves made.

Nicky Gavron AM: That is interesting. Will you bring that up again under policy? We are talking about London needing five million plus square metres, which is being put rather graphically as the equivalent of 82 or 83 Walkie Talkies. That is over the next couple of decades, so they obviously have to go somewhere.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): They probably will not all go in tall buildings - mostly not tall buildings, actually.

Kit Malthouse AM: Just a final thing from me, Peter. When you left the City, how many tall buildings in the Square Mile were unbuilt? The Pinnacle is obviously half-built.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): The Pinnacle is currently stopped because of an internal dispute between the developer and the funder. I am sure that will be resolved and they will sell the site and it will get underway again. There are perhaps three or four others with planning permission of similar scale. They are tending to start as soon as they get planning permission, as I say, because of the incredibly low vacancy rates.

Kit Malthouse AM: Thank you.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Peter, you wanted to come in on offices.

Peter Murray (Chairman, New London Architecture): I was just going to say it is not quite correct to say that there are no offices being developed at Canary Wharf at the moment. The offices that are being developed at Canary Wharf are relatively low-rise because they are looking at attracting the technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) sector. They want to recreate the sort of campus-like environment that they might be more used to in California. The towers in Canary Wharf in Wood Wharf, phase two of Canary Wharf, are all residential and that is because, as Peter says, the value is in residential more than offices; and there the highest towers are actually the ones with the best views and they can get really good prices for ones with spectacular views. That is a sort of pressure on height that you can see happening in somewhere like New York. The skyline of New York is changing very fast because super slender

towers are popping up even above the high buildings of New York because of this desire for, and value of, good views.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We will have to go higher. We have had quite a long discussion there about the impact of these towers on London and Londoners, who is going to them, what they are for and their purpose. I now want to move on to look at the skyline. Navin is going to deal with this.

Navin Shah AM: Yes, thank you, Chair. The Skyline campaign has raised the temperature a bit. It is a very welcome debate that it has generated, which London needed. This is a question to Rowan as well as Julia. Do these towers proposed and under construction make a positive contribution to London’s skyline?

Rowan Moore (architecture critic, The Observer): Thank you. Just on a point of fact, we were talking earlier and Tony cited an opinion poll in which he said 80% of people wanted to live in towers. The poll he refers to actually has, “I would be happy living in a tall building”, and 10% strongly agreed and 17% tended to agree, so the figure is actually 27%. I just wanted to put that right. Still, 27% is a number of people who want to live in towers. To answer your question, really, what is driving the campaign is a very strong belief that the admirable statements of policy 7.7 in the London Plan and the CABE/English Heritage tall buildings guidance, are really not being achieved in highly sensitive locations in London. This is really a question of stewardship. We are talking about, as the Mayor loves to say, the greatest city in the world. We are talking about world-class development, totally. These words keep being used. We are talking about something that millions of tourists want to come and see. It is world famous for its physical appearance, among other things. This is a shared asset for all Londoners and has values attached and has United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) world heritage sites in it. What is now happening is a fundamental redesign of the appearance of that city, including its most significant and central areas, especially around the river. It is a radical transformation of the city. Of course, London has always been a dynamic city. London has had tall buildings for quite a long time.

We are not against all change, but I have here a montage of some of the existing and planned towers. The top is the forthcoming cluster at Vauxhall and Nine Elms. On the right is the Walkie Talkie, which you can get a better view of out of the window when we have a break. Then the one at the bottom left is Blackfriars. On the right is 1 Blackfriars, which Tony is building, as he said, having bought it out of receivership. On the left is the recently consented Ludgate House. These are going to be the most conspicuous buildings in London. If you are building such conspicuous buildings, it raises the bar in terms of quality of architecture and planning. The onus is on the people, both developers and planners, who want this to happen to really demonstrate to a very high level that we need these buildings, and that they are beneficial to the city. I do not think we have really heard that case made so far this morning. I do not believe these are of the quality that London deserves.

I also think that there should be simply places where you just do not build at all. Of course, we do have the new management framework which defines that to some extent, but we are also talking about the quality of places like the river, and I do not think it has been very well defined.

What sort of place is the river? What should it be? What is acceptable development along it? Of course, people will say it is a matter of taste and architecture is a matter that is subjective. However, I would ask what is positively good about these buildings?

Also, it should be something we can all agree on that any building, big or small, should work well with whatever is next to it, both existing and potentially in the future. I do not really see that in these particular developments. If you take the Blackfriars site, 1 Blackfriars has this very assertive, aggressive form. It is incredibly hard to put another building next to it in a way that is in any way harmonious or compatible. I do not think you can look at Ludgate House, which I would say is the more elegant structure, but there is no really meaningful relationship between them.

Just to touch briefly on the question of housing need, the top 27 storeys of Ludgate House - it is a 47-storey tower - so the 27 storeys above 20, which will be the more contentious part of it, actually delivers 65 flats. The kind of dent that makes in the annual target of 42,000 is very modest indeed. If you are talking about housing that Londoners need, a studio flat in 1 Blackfriars starts at £1,080,000. It does not really matter if we are talking about selling to Asians or British people. Whoever it is, these are not really serious contributions to London’s housing need. I take Tony’s [Pidgley] point about £70 million in contributions to planning going in tax, but that can also be achieved by lower buildings. You do not just have to take my word for it. We mentioned St George Wharf Tower. What has not been said clearly yet is that that did go to a public inquiry. The public inquiry found against it, did not find it in conformity with policy. John Prescott [former Deputy Prime Minister and First Secretary of State], highly controversially and against the advice of his civil servants, reversed the decision of the planning inquiry. Yet now we find that taken as a precedent for everything else that is happening at Vauxhall and Nine Elms. I do not think that level of care and accountability and scrutiny that London deserves is happening on these sites.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): It is not being used as a benchmark for height anymore.

Rowan Moore (architecture critic, The Observer): The other thing is that two years ago Colin [Wilson] and Sir Edward [Lister] under their leadership produced the Opportunity Area Framework for Vauxhall, Nine Elms and Battersea. They set a level of 120 metres below the height of St George Wharf Tower as a threshold. That was two years ago. That was consulted on, although I would say in a rather limited way very locally, but nonetheless the consultation on that process produced a threshold of 120 metres. Now we see buildings coming forward that are considerably higher than that being consented. I do not know where the consistency is. I do not know where the big picture is. I do not know where the oversight and real London-wide consultation is on this.

Navin Shah AM: Julia, in terms of architectural critique as to the quality of these very prominent, hugely visible, architectural skyscrapers that we have; how do you rate them, as well as the cumulative impact of skyscrapers on London? Is it positive or do you have any further comments on planning policies which help or do not in terms of producing a high-quality architectural environment?

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, MBA): Actually, a lot of what Rowan [Moore] has said I was going to say as well. In terms of actual architectural quality, the bar is certainly not set high enough. A lot of the buildings, particularly in Vauxhall, particularly the Vauxhall Tower and the Strada building in Elephant and Castle, really do not meet the definitions in the London Plan of the highest architectural quality or world-class buildings. They simply do not. In fact, the Vauxhall Tower has now yesterday been shortlisted for the Carbuncle Cup. It is simply not good enough. We should be trying to create the heritage of the future. This is a heritage city. A lot of tall buildings are part of our heritage. There are 11 listed tall buildings in London already, so it is not that we are against tall buildings at all. They just need to be really good ones and that is simply not happening at the moment.

Navin Shah AM: Chair, there is a section later on as to how that quality could be improved and what the measures that one might want to consider are, so I will not go into that now. I do not know if, Sunand, you want to come in and any other members of the panel about the quality and other issues.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): I would like to. A key point about the Skyline campaign is in the word ‘skyline’ because it is actually the aggregation of the various individual buildings that makes the skyline. We do not have a method yet in our planning system which can actually adequately take account of that impact, which is very often not about adjacent buildings and is not even about the context as such. It is very true; in the London Plan there are some really excellent targets and aims. In a way I think that reality has overtaken the Plan a bit. One does not need to be critical of the London Plan or any such thing in order to say that we have not yet got a way of dealing with the accumulative aggregate impact of tall buildings in London. We just do not have a way yet, partly because it is a very subjective field. There are many things about tall buildings that we can talk very objectively about. You can be objective about density, impact of ground levels, sustainability and cost of building. The visual appearance of an aggregation of tall buildings in a city is a subjective issue. We do not have a way yet of dealing with it. What the Skyline campaign is flagging up, and I shall declare an interest that I signed the letter, is that there are many individual tall buildings that are wonderful. This is not a question about banning tall buildings. However, I think some stricter test should be applied. In particular, we should find some way of dealing with the aggregate impact on areas which are quite outside the immediate area of influence, which the planning system finds quite difficult to deal with. Even though there are Mayoral powers and so on we have not yet got a way of doing it.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Peter Rees, just at the beginning when it was known Ken [Livingstone, former Mayor of London] was going to allow roughly 12 tall buildings in the City, outside the Historic Wall - the Walkie Talkie I think is in it, we talked then about a cluster policy. Now I hear constantly, “I cannot see the Gherkin. It has been crowded out. What is going on with the City?” We were told it was impossible to have any kind of way of saying, “This one is this height” and “This will have to work with that” - the kind of things that Sunand has just been talking about. It was said it was impossible.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places & City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): It is not impossible but it is difficult. You cannot do it much through planning policy under the British planning

system, the reactive planning system that we have. We do not have a master planning system like they have in the rest of the world, where you can pre-designate the shape of the place.

I had to use Welsh guile and cunning to try and shape the cluster in the city. We decided that there would be one side taller than the other, the pinnacle. Of course, you cannot ensure that that building then gets built. As we know, at the moment it is on hold. If it does get completed it will be the centre point of the cluster, and the other buildings step down away towards St Paul’s and towards the river. The Walkie Talkie is deliberately outside of the cluster, to form a viewing platform for London with its top three floor public gallery which will have views all around. Of course, if that had been inside the cluster the view would have gradually been lost from it. Therefore that is deliberately outside, all on its own. The buildings within the cluster, of course, do cluster together. The Gherkin was the first and will eventually be surrounded by other buildings in that cluster, but all stepping down away from a central point. I agree it is incredibly difficult to do that under the British planning control system because you cannot guarantee which buildings will or will not be built, even if you give permission for them.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): I am coming in, but is there not an opportunity now? We have just heard Sir Edward Lister saying that most of these are going to be in opportunity areas where we know they have planning frameworks. However, the scrutiny of planning frameworks is frankly not as extensive as a plan or an individual permission, as Tony was talking about, where there is a lot of scrutiny for an individual building. Is there not an opportunity now for some master planning in the way that you have just been talking about?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places & City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): You can set negative constraints. We were lucky in the City that we had the strategic views of St Paul’s, we had St Paul’s heights, we had the threshold for the flights going in to City Airport. All of those were constraints that helped us to shape the City and limit what would happen in terms of height. You can add more constraints to a plan to have even more factors which will shape and define where it is possible to build tall, by defining where you cannot. However, the British system is very much a negative system. I am not saying it is impossible and at a strategic level you could have more height controls in the way that we have with the existing infrastructure.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Is there nothing to stop a planning framework going one further and being a master plan in the way we are talking about? We are talking about more towers coming in other areas of London. They are proposed. Some have got permission. Why can we not do that?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places & City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): As I say, you could set height limits in different areas. You can set those negative controls which would have that effect. Yes, you could do that in a strategic plan.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): As New York used to do?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places & City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): A number of historic towns have those --

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Vancouver does.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places & City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): Yes.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning, GLA): I just really wanted to come in to make the point these are clusters. You can argue about tall buildings but they are in clusters. These are clusters which are emerging. To be fair, the photographs, certainly the Blackfriars Bridge Road one, do not actually pick up the full view of what will be taking place along Blackfriars Bridge Road as you move towards Elephant and Castle. You will have a much more significant cluster there than is actually shown in that photograph.

Kit Malthouse AM: There are nine skyscrapers, I think, for Blackfriars?

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning, GLA): I cannot give you the exact -- it is that sort of number, it is around there. Likewise Vauxhall Nine Elms, many of those buildings are evolving as we speak. In fairness those are images which are changing. Indeed the centrepiece, which is One Market Towers, which is the very tall one there, has just gone through planning permission and has been radically changed from what you see there.

Kit Malthouse AM: Higher or lower?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places & City Planning, The Bartlett, UCLA): Higher.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning, GLA): It is fractionally higher.

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): There are no offices?

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning, GLA): Yes, it has not got the offices in it but it has hotels which are creating employment and all the rest of it.

Kit Malthouse AM: Low grade employment.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning, GLA): I am sorry, five star plus hotels are not low grade employment. They are good quality employment. I think we should be clear about that. Not everybody can work in the City of London in a very smart insurance office. That is not what all of Londoners need. They need a range of jobs, and that provides a range of jobs. I am sorry; I get very cross about that type of argument.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): I know you do. I wanted to make a different point though but, in fact, just on that, local people were very fed up that they lost 500 office jobs. I know instead they got --

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning, GLA): They got 500 hotel jobs on that particular site.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Yes, but not instead of the office jobs.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning, GLA): No. That is right. Are you suggesting that the 500 office jobs would have gone to people necessarily living in that area? I suggest to you that might not have been the case in any event. There are also other office blocks in that area. There is close on a million square foot in the Battersea Power Station itself which is all commercial office space, I suppose it is high-rise on our 30 metre rule.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): I think it is pretty high. Edward, we are talking about clusters. Here you are creating a cluster because you have just changed the benchmark of the height, whether people like it or not, of St George’s Tower. That was going to be the highest and they were going to slope away. We will come on to heritage in a minute. It is now going to go up. It is going to be different. You are, in a sense, creating a cluster. You are manipulating, not in the best sense of the word and the outcome may not be the best, the relationship. You are having a go at it.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning, GLA): We are planning a new centrepiece to the cluster and taking the cluster up away from the river and then dropping it back down again, in a not dissimilar way that Peter described the City, to create a centrepiece.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Yes. Julia, you wanted to comment?

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): I just want to come in about Vauxhall because I think Vauxhall has been a huge missed opportunity in the Island site. Somebody bought the Island site speculatively. There was no master plan to say that no one should build on that particular site. As a result an opportunity to create a proper urban space in Vauxhall, surrounded by all of these huge towers, was missed. I think this is something that is a really important point, that we should have master plans. We should actually say where you cannot build, as well as where you can build. Somebody should say, “We want high-quality public space”. You need a proportion of public space to tall buildings. I live just around the corner from there so I feel very strongly about it. I think it is a really bad, missed opportunity. The linear park comes up and then stops and does not reach the centre, does not reach the tube station, and I think that there has been a failure of policy.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning, GLA): I think there is an emerging plan for the area. It is worth just making the point that the Island site got through an appeal process because of a non-determination by the local authority. That was how it actually got there.

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): Yes, because they did not have a plan in place.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning, GLA): That is slightly before many of our people’s time here.

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): As Peter said, they were reactive. I am saying that with these opportunity areas maybe that lesson should be learned, and you should have a master plan that determines where the open space should go.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning, GLA): We have determined where the open space -- sorry, it is in the linear park which stretches through to that area. That is actually clearly in the Plan and it is in all the planning documents.

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): Sorry, I am talking about Vauxhall, not the whole --

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): -- the Vauxhall end?

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): No. I am talking about Vauxhall where the cluster is.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We have to come back to cluster because there is no doubt that people really, really want more scrutiny and people seem to want master planning. We are hearing it everywhere. Much more control over these clusters. We come back to it under policy.

I would like just to move us on to heritage for a moment, and for the seat which Peter was occupying to be taken by Dr Nigel Barker from English Heritage. Thank you Peter, we will call you back in a minute. Kit, you were going to take this.

Kit Malthouse AM: There is an obvious significant impact on heritage. I think the Shell Centre was just allowed by Eric Pickles [Secretary of State for Communities & Local Government] yesterday which will have a big impact on the World Heritage site. Obviously the development at Nine Elms now looms up above the back of the Abbey as you look down Whitehall and is likely to do so even more. It is interesting Peter talks about the view from the Walkie Talkie presumably trumping the view to the Walkie Talkie from the Tower, it dominates the Embankment from Temple all the way along through Blackfriars. Presumably you have some significant concerns about this development in terms of just the heritage assets that we have?

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): I think our significance is that we have a piece of guidance which has already been referred to by Sunand, and we have a development plan and the London Plan which says the right things. We do not think that necessarily we need any more policy. I think the issues that we have and are seeing at the moment are resources to actually implement the policies and political leadership to ensure those policies are actually sensitively delivered. This goes back to Peter’s point that a lot of the difficulties about proactive planning of shaping clusters, shaping places, whatever you call it, are self-inflicted; because we do not have a clear vision for what we are actually trying to achieve. Colin Wilson [Strategic Planning Manager, GLA] and I have had debates about what he would regard as being a Utopian vision for a plan for London which is far too detailed and restrictive, and my concern that we have now moved from a plan-led process that is not being properly implemented.

If you look at what we say about tall buildings, and the reason we have specific guidance on tall buildings is because it is a recognition that they have the most impact over the widest area. That is why we have that guidance. We are very clear that we are not anti-tall buildings either. As has already been indicated, we have listed some of them. We are not in the business of trying to determine the architectural quality of those buildings. What we are in the business of saying is that the existing character, and particularly the existing historic environment, has a value itself. At the moment we feel that value is not being recognised and is not being clearly weighed in the balance in the way that the national planning framework requires it to be done. Therefore it is almost a philosophical argument. We are having short-term issues, which are complex, that are driving taller development. We have a longer term issue about what we want London to look like; how we manage its outstanding legacy of change over decade, millennia; and how we recognise and factor in the economic, cultural, social and environmental value of that historic environment.

Kit Malthouse AM: What do you think the impact on all those things is likely to be of these 200 and whatever it is towers?

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): I am going to say something that is potentially fairly controversial, I think there is complacency at the moment. I think people see London as being incredibly successful. We are on a high. We delivered an amazing Olympics. We are seeing the benefits of visitors coming to London. One of the attractors for the Olympics was the quality of the historic environment. People come to London, it is recognised, and it is unique. It is now the number one cultural city in the world, a lot of it fostered through the Greater London Authority (GLA) through their cultural strategy etc. However, there is a complacency that says the historic environment will be there. People will always come and see it. They will always draw on it. We do not need to worry too much about it. Let us concentrate on the new stuff. The scale of transformation that is going on in London at the moment, I think could threaten the value of London as a place to come and visit, as a place to come and live, to actually enjoy the democracy of the streets of London because we are creating different sorts of areas which do not actually say, “this is London”. I think that is the nub of our concern. It goes back to Tony’s first point about places. What sort of places are we creating with this sort of development?

Kit Malthouse AM: Sorry, is your objection height, vernacular or both?

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): It is not an objection to height. I think the key thing that we need to sort out is location. I think the opportunity area structure is one way of doing it but it is not sophisticated enough. If we maintain that route then our argument is you need a lot more upfront analysis of what you are doing. We have seen that the minute you put -- this guidance says you should be identifying areas that are suitable - I notice a thread - suitable for tall buildings, those which are sensitive to tall buildings and those where you should not have them. I cannot think of any recent documents that I have seen that have said we are not going to have tall buildings. That part of the guidance is never implemented.

I have seen lots which say - like the Waterloo area framework - for various reasons this is a suitable, or potentially suitable, place for a tall building and then there are all the environmental caveats. What happens is people look at the first bit and they do not look at the second bit. They say, “Ah, but it is suitable for tall buildings. That is what we are going for.” You are then in to a situation where it is on a case by case basis and it is a huge amount of work and it is a huge amount of delay and you do not get the certainty. Our fundamental point is that if you are going to go down the route of identifying places that are suitable, places that are potential for other reasons, you need to factor in the historic environment and the existing values of what you have got around it, both in its immediate context and in its citywide context. We had two examples in my previous life outside London. Brighton, a city which is hemmed in by the South Downs to the north, and the sea to the south, cannot go anywhere. It has not got a green belt. It has a national park there. They needed to think about going up and so their strategy was at a citywide level and it was a sieve strategy. Starting with topography and then looking at all of the issues, transport, what existing tall buildings they have got, and what opportunities. Through a fairly sophisticated sieve out dropped a few areas where we could start to look. Medway, North Kent - fascinating topography, river running through it, huge areas of potential, huge areas of decay - exactly the same process. They saw tall buildings as being a way of marking a new character for Medway. If you mention Chatham, people have a certain vision of Chatham, they wanted to change that; tall buildings was their chosen way forward. We took a similar approach there. I think what we are saying is we need that certainty, that upfront work here, on a citywide level. The GLA are the body to be doing it.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Do you want to come in, Tom?

Tom Copley AM: Yes, just briefly. Do you think that some of the tall buildings that are going up now or have gone up in 100 years’ time will be part of the London heritage, and will we be talking about protected views of the Shard in 100 years?

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): The Walkie Talkie is part of London’s heritage now. The minute they go up they have a value. Those values will be different for people from their different perspectives. Will the Walkie Talkie become a listed building? I would not bet on it.

Tom Copley AM: The Shard might.

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): The Shard might. Good building, wrong location, our point.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Yes, are there any other comments on heritage? Julia, do you want to comment?

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): I think we do need to talk about architectural quality at Centre Point. Because they are so prominent from all around the place I think we do need to try and get better at defining what is architectural quality.

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): I absolutely agree.

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): It is very, very difficult. Personally I think the Shard is beautiful. I think it is a very beautiful building. The way it reflects the light, the way it reflects the spires of London churches, I think it is definitely one part of London’s heritage that we should be proud of, and we will be proud of in the future. There are others that clearly we will not. I do not pretend to have all the answers, but we need to get better somehow about defining that is good quality architecture, what are beautiful buildings and what are not.

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): I absolutely agree with you. However, what I am saying is that we should not be using, as we currently do and the Shell Centre decision is a classic case in point, claimed architectural quality as a justification for harm to existing character and value. That is what we have got wrong which is why I am focusing on location. I am not saying if you get the right location you do not need to worry about architectural quality.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Rowan, you want to come in.

Rowan Moore (Architecture Critic, The Observer): Can I just make a brief point on quality, which is again and again we are seeing permission being granted for one building and then something quite significantly different in terms of its quality being built. We see the architect is displaced as soon as they get planning consent. Lord Finch was complaining to me about St George’s Tower which is a building that he likes but he says the planning and the detail is not what he thought he was going to get at the time he supported it through CABE. This is a problem that goes back years. Until a genuine way is found of fixing it I think this argument for excusing buildings on the basis of their architectural quality, even if they are in the wrong place, just cannot be used.

Kit Malthouse AM: I agree with you. The other thing is excusing buildings on the basis of their architect. It is often accepted that just because it is Richard Rogers it is going to be good, whereas in fact most of it is rubbish.

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): May I just say I think more councils now are actually putting as part of a planning condition that the architect must be maintained.

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): That is very hard to enforce.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places & City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): It is unenforceable.

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): Is it?

Peter Rees (Professor of Places & City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): People are trying but if you are taken to court you would not stand a chance.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We never would have given the Shard permission unless it was that design by that hand. That was the deal and Giles [Dolphin, former Head of Planning Decisions, GLA] found a condition.

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): I appreciate that but when they come to court they lost, always. I guess it is good to try to do it.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We have got to sort this out.

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): That comes back to the point of how you set the culture for design or architectural quality. Going back to that discussion about the cluster in Vauxhall, the GLA did consult reasonably widely on the initial form of the cluster. English Heritage was part of that consultation. Part of that original balancing act, if you like, was to come up with something that would respect, as far as possible, the setting of the adjacent World Heritage site. About 150 metres was regarded as being the right height for that issue. When the cluster then starts to get remodelled on an individual basis, without that same extensive consultation, from our perspective we are left with having an existing valued element of the context now being left out of the decision making process. That cannot be right. That cannot be good planning. That is why I think if we are going to go down the route of the opportunity areas, because there are other drivers; we need to deliver housing; we need to deliver densities, whatever it is; we need to actually just say we can’t just deliver those alone through one piece of policy. We must always remember that delivering that objective sits within something that is incredibly valued, which is the historic environment. We need to maintain those links.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): I do not know whether I am putting words in your mouth, but what you are saying is let us just take Big Ben, the Palace of Westminster, the two points you have made, one earlier about Elizabeth House, now you are making one about the Vauxhall and Nine Elms cluster, and what you are saying is that they will affect what is actually a very iconic view and one of our past heritage. They will affect people’s views of Big Ben.

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): What I am saying is that I think you have to understand what they contribute. You have to understand what is significant and important about those existing assets and their setting; and that should be informing the policy at an early stage, and giving you the clarity of whether it is a suitable location for the tall building. The minute you say potentially or suitable, that is the form of development, in our experience, that comes forward. It does not matter what else you try to say, that is the bit that is picked out. That Shell decision has shown that it was unanimous. I think the inspector says, on policy saying that this site is suitable for tall buildings. It does not actually say there will be tall buildings on this site. It says it has the potential, subject to all of the other environmental caveats. The inspector does not look at all of the other environmental caveats so we have a problem. That is why we are saying when we are revising this guidance, which we are about to do, we need to make that clearer.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Sunand, and then we must move on.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): A quick question, for you really. Currently the viewing corridors rule out or hugely mitigate where --

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning, GLA): They limit.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): -- limit where tall buildings can be. The presumption is that if you are outside them, there are no rules outside the viewing corridors.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): They have been broken inside.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning, GLA): Sorry, just the suggestion that they have been broken. They have not been broken. They were widened. Sorry, the viewing corridors were widened by the Mayor in the last edition of the London Plan quite significantly. The Shard was pre that time, to be fair. The Mayor, at the last edition, has widened the corridors.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): I am talking about the views of the Palace of Westminster and from the Palace of Westminster.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): Let us assume that the viewing corridors exist. They are adhered to and they are thought through. The point is that outside that there are effectively no hard and fast rules. There are Opportunity Area Planning Frameworks (OAPFs) and so on that we can use as a guide. Are you suggesting almost an inversion of that? Which is it actually you are presumed not to be able to build unless you say it is suitable for building? Do you see what I am saying?

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): Yes, I am not saying an absolute ban so I am falling in to the criticism that I have accused others of saying. I am not saying you cannot build. Let us just tackle the view frameworks. At the moment there is a perception that if you comply with the view management framework you are automatically protecting the historic environment. That is not the case. We have examples, and the Shell Centre again is another one, where you have a view which contributes to the setting of one historic asset but within that view is another historic aspect, and the contribution within that view to that asset is different. Complying with the policies of the view will not do it for helping or sustaining the historic environment in its setting. I think that is done for the right reasons but an unhelpful confusion that we are now in, where people just think, “Strategically I need to deal with the London View Management Framework (LVMF) because that will tell me where I can put my tall buildings or not. It has a policy for each view. It tells me more or less how the view should be managed. If I do that I am dealing with context and therefore I have dealt with the historic environment.”

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): Does this not go back to your point about resources? It is much easier with limited resources to follow rules clearly --

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): It is.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): -- which have clearly set down objectives. What we are looking at is a new type of resource which is able to juggle something far more complex.

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): I agree with you. I think that everyone likes a rule. They can argue then why that rule should be broken for them. They like a rule. It is easier to deal with it. It helps the system work more quickly, going back to the point about the realities of life. I think there is more we can do to try and actually untangle this and get in to a position where the GLA, they are the appropriate authority, are taking the lead. Trying to set politically and also in their planning function, a bit more of a clearer lead on how they are going to balance up the need for all of the growth; the need for new development; and all of the things that we accept because if the City fails function, then its existing environment will fail, ie the bit that I am really, really interested in. They need to balance that up. I think the balance has gone at the moment. That is our concern.

Nicky Gavron (Chair): Your role is advisory, is it?

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): Our role is advisory. We do have powers of direction at the moment.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): You are statutory but advisory?

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): Statutory but advisory.

Stewart Murray (Assistant Director of Planning, GLA): But the policy, Chair, in the London Plan we talk about areas outside the more sensitive areas. It is very explicit. The London Plan takes the lead on identifying areas and the criteria. Also in policy 7.7 we have avoided the other very key stakeholders, which are the London boroughs, where it is explicitly saying that the Mayor will work with the boroughs to identify appropriate sensitive and inappropriate areas for tall buildings. So, boroughs are working on their local plans at a much more finely grained level for their boroughs. It is not true to say that the London Plan does not look at areas beyond those sensitive historic areas. The boroughs are working with us and they have got tall buildings policies. They are the subject of very detailed consultation, and they have to be in conformity with the London Plan and the NPPF and they consult English Heritage on other areas. Therefore the whole of London has a planning policy framework to ensure that buildings are only located in appropriate places.

Kit Malthouse AM: That is against also the background of an assumption that the planners are pro tall buildings in those areas. It is not like if you go for that area the declared planning policy of both Mayors thus far has been we will go up. We are happy to do it. There is no kind of resistance, if you like. Once it is there it is there.

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): I think I go back to my opening comment, I am saying we have a plan policy. We have a local plan which actually says what it needs to say. I have got a note here saying, on the policy side from an English Heritage perspective – OK-ish. We have the negotiations, we have the discussions. Actually implementing the policy and then on individual applications, I do not think it is working. That is the area that we –

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): -- We will be coming to policy in a moment, but what we are hearing is either we need more policies; or we are hearing both we need more policies, and also the ones we have got are not necessarily being implemented properly.

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): I would not argue that we need more policies. That is why when we are going to revise the guidance here we are going to keep the fundamentals because I think we got it right. I think Sunand contributed to it. The fundamentals of this guidance is right. I think it is how you translate this guidance through to implementation.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): It is just guidance.

Dr Nigel Barker (Planning & Conservation Director, English Heritage): It is, but it has weight and it is reflected in the London Plan.

Stewart Murray (Assistant Director of Planning, GLA): It is all here.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We will come back to policy in a minute.

Kit Malthouse AM: Nicky, could I just ask a question? I know we are going to move on to policy, but I just want to ask Rowan, against the background of 200 and whatever it is that are in the pipeline what do you want your campaign to achieve? Do you half of them cancelled? Do you want no more? What is the objective of your campaign?

Rowan Moore (Architecture Critic, The Observer): The objective is a better and more effective policy framework and implementation of that policy.

Kit Malthouse AM: To result in what?

Rowan Moore (Architecture Critic, The Observer): To result in a more coherent planning of tall buildings, and very clear statements that in certain areas you do not build.

Kit Malthouse AM: Not necessarily fewer?

Rowan Moore (Architecture Critic, The Observer): We are not against towers. Of course, we are talking about very different kinds of situations. Stratford, Croydon and Ilford are all different situations. People tend to concentrate on the river because that is the most significant place for the whole of London. We are not against all towers everywhere. However, we believe

that, as I said, if you want to build high it raises the bar for quality in architecture and planning and we are not seeing that realised.

Kit Malthouse AM: You would say then because that has not been in place there have been errors thus far?

Rowan Moore (Architecture Critic, The Observer): Yes. We think Vauxhall and Blackfriars are both errors. They are not reversible errors. We do not want to see more like them.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): I want to just spend a few minutes on the environment. There is an environment committee here which is looking at how resilient London is in the future. How, at the moment, most of the building controls are way out of day. How is London going to manage with much hotter summers and the urban heat island effect, with rain and so on. I want to just bring in Sunand, and I want Jane Wernick to come up to the platform and sit on the seat. The issue really is how green can tall buildings be? I do not know if you want to kick off, Sunand?

Jane Wernick (Director, Jane Wernick Associates): Could I make a statement actually?

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Would you like to start, Jane?

Jane Wernick (Director, Jane Wernick Associates): I would like to, yes. Thank you. I would just like to make a few remarks about sustainability in general.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): You are a structural engineer?

Jane Wernick (Director, Jane Wernick Associates): I am a structural engineer. I have a small practice. I did years ago work with Julia on the Wheel. Given the impending crisis of global warming, I think we have to think much more carefully about the environmental impacts of tall buildings. We need to explore all of the possible typologies, as has been mentioned by Peter. Central Paris with its fairly narrow roughly eight-storey high blocks achieves the same density as Beijing, so we do not have to go tall to achieve high density. To talk about environmental sustainability, from the point of view of embodied energy and carbon footprint, the taller the building the higher the amount of embodied energy required per useable square metre. This is largely because the wind speeds increase the higher up you go, and the greater are the overturning forces at the base as a result of those wind loads. The taller a building is the less likely it is that we can use low carbon alternatives such as timber. However long the life of a building, and however well we design it, and however much technology we throw at our design, if it is twice the height of another one made from the same materials and built to the same standards it will have used a lot more energy to build. Tall buildings need more lifts than shorter ones. That means we need more space for vertical circulation per useable square metre of the building. This decreases the net gross. It decreases the efficiency of the building.

Tall buildings suffer more highly from heat losses for the same amount of insulation as lower buildings because of the higher wind speeds. Again, more efficiency is required to run those buildings.

As far as the use of renewable energy is concerned, generally solar, wind and recycled water harvesting are considered. If we start to build clusters of tall buildings then the amount of overshadowing which compromises the neighbour’s ability to harvest solar energy will increase. The effectiveness of wind turbines on tall buildings definitely has not yet been demonstrated. A smaller footprint of those buildings per useable square metre also means that there is less rainwater to harvest. As far as all the environmental impact and sustainability assessments are concerned, we have got to start insisting on proper evaluations being carried out post- completion. It is too easy to make grand claims that are never substantiated. There is a great deal of subjectivity over issues such as wind effects at street level and the knock on effects on other buildings. We do not do enough to make sure that if the effects are worse than predicted proper amelioration measures are put in place.

From the point of economic sustainability - I think these have been covered already - they cost more to build per useable square metre, and they cost more to maintain and repair per square metre. They tend to be really quite difficult to adapt, and the cost of retrofitting is really high. When you think about a building we know the structure can last for a very long time. We have not come up with any type of façade or cladding system, nor any type of servicing, wiring and all the rest of it, that does not need replacing on a much shorter cycle.

Finally, with regard to social sustainability, unless they are really well designed with plenty of spaces for chance encounters and social interactions, they do tend to have an adverse effect on the mental health of those who live in them. It is particularly true for housing, especially for families with children. Crime, and fear of crime, is also greater in tall buildings. Most people benefit from some regular access to outside space. As you get higher it is much more difficult to design external balconies. As I already mentioned as they get taller, buildings need to be wider at the bottom in order to stand up. This not only leads to deep plan spaces, but also makes the city much less permeable at the street level. We have heard how tall buildings can have really well-organised spaces for social interaction. However, do we really want a city in which most of the places where interaction occurs is within the building or their own demise, in a semi or wholly privatised environment? Picture Dubai, or many of the cities in America. Is it not London’s street life which has always made it so great?

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Thank you very much. I just wonder how people want to respond to that, we have to be fairly quick. It does overlap with how buildings interact with the public realm around them. Sunand?

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): I will be as quick as I can. I think that the statistics about energy, resource use, more materials, longevity of design systems, all that is currently true. I do not think we can disagree at all with that. That is just a fact. The only question is, are technologies going to improve fast enough to ameliorate some of those things? Are there circumstances in which it is worth doing that even though it is more costly and so on? There may be arguments for that. On social sustainability and permeability, I think it is possible to design tall buildings which are socially sustainable and permeable. The Cheesegrater has a big public space right at the bottom of it. That is one example. Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank has created an enormous public space, in Hong Kong, under a tall building.

I think those assertions are more questionable. I would love to live in a city at about the thirtieth floor with a balcony. There are some wonderful things about it too. Of course, everything that you say about families and so on is true. On the whole, I think there is little doubt that tall buildings cannot be as green as lower buildings - all the evidence points that way. I think that is something to be taken in to account. There is actually a Master of Arts and Master of Philosophy course in Nottingham, which is specifically about sustainable tall buildings. Therefore people are researching it. It is an active and live subject.

Jane Wernick (Director, Jane Wernick Associates): My point is that it is not being taken at all seriously now, in the planning process. I have been on the CABE design review panel for many years and the submissions that are made with regard to sustainability are derisory. Nobody does ever go back and check whether those grand claims are going to be realised. We are not doing any post-construction evaluation. That is a very general topic anyway. If we are going to have a chance of not being overcome by global warming, we have got to start doing much better post-occupancy evaluation. I think it should be a requirement of the planning consent process that all that data should be kept. Also, as an engineer, there are so many projects where we are involved in, working on existing buildings, and clients are still not honouring their commitment to keeping hold of all the information about the buildings so that we can properly work on them. There are all sorts of issues to do with sustainability that should come under the planning process that are not being --

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Jane, you would want something about embodied energy, you would want something about environmental impact assessments.

Jane Wernick (Director, Jane Wernick Associates): Carbon emissions and use.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): All that is in policy. It is not that it is not there.

Jane Wernick (Director, Jane Wernick Associates): It is just not being enforced.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): We are back to the question of are we actually implementing the policies we already have. I think that we have very clear policy documents --

Jane Wernick (Director, Jane Wernick Associates): I think we all agree the policy document is good.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): -- all of those are very good. I think there is a cultural problem in the construction industry generally about feedback and about performance evaluation of all buildings, let alone tall buildings. A case could be made that since tall buildings are so particularly impactful that we should be particularly attentive to them. I know that you at Berkeley carry out performance evaluations and post-occupancy evaluations (POEs) so it is quite possible to do so. The government is not minded to enforce it and in some ways it is up to the industry maybe in the meanwhile to do that.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Yes, but we need to look at whether the GLA also --

Navin Shah AM: Let me just say, hitting the ground --

Peter Rees (Professor of Places & City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): Before you do could I just suggest, a way of getting better enforcement on energy performance and all of those sorts of things would be to transfer it to building control, from planning. Building control is pass or fail. It is a rule, you have to meet it. Planning is subject to political interpretation.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): That is a good point.

Kit Malthouse AM: There are, although, technological difficulties. Builders are constantly pushing the envelope. The great example of that, of course, is the fans on the Lipstick that you presumably were involved with, Nicky, and Elephant and Castle, which presumably were part of the great green vision, but have never turned. They have never turned since it was built.

Jane Wernick (Director, Jane Wernick Associates): That might offset a couple of pieces of glass.

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): But they never worked.

Kit Malthouse AM: But it was a big part of the selling point for the developer getting --

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): --Is it made for the electricity for the stairs and the common parts; that was the most intelligent --

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): I was the one who thought of the solar panels on the roof of this building.

Kit Malthouse AM: It does not work here either. The solar panels do not work on the roof.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Really? It should. It is not my fault it does not work.

Jane Wernick (Director, Jane Wernick Associates): Definitely solar on buildings, when you cluster it, is not going to work.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Can we move on to hitting the ground, the way these buildings fit into their context at the ground level? Navin, you were going to do this.

Navin Shah AM: Yes, it is interesting and important that we talked about the harm, or the impact in terms of tall buildings that they have on skyline. It is also important in architectural quality terms, etc, to look at what they do, what impact they have, at ground level. Because, often, tall buildings are criticised in the way they do not relate to ground level in terms of where they have impact on surrounding areas, pollution, shadowing, poor-looking, and so on. Therefore the question is what can be done to make a tall building fit better into their

immediate surrounding areas, create better environment and public realm as well. Maybe the two architects might want to answer.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): Every design review of a tall building that I have been at, I would say 50% of the conversation was about how the building hit the ground, and significant changes were achieved. For example, the Shard at the beginning was very, very poor at low level, at ground level, and through a process of design review it was enormously improved. The point is that the science and art of knowing how buildings should touch the ground and what should happen around them and how public realm should be is in pretty good shape when it is properly done. There are very, very good examples of doing it. It is not as puzzling and difficult to tackle as the more subjective issues of heritage, the skyline, and so on. I think that the policies that are in place again spell it out very, very clearly and, especially in the last 20 years, and especially in the Mayoralty of the last two Mayors the level of knowledge and understanding of public realm I think is better than it has been for a long time. I think that is one thing that we can say that we can do. We do not always do it. Tony is talking about place-making. I think that we know how that is done. It is a question of doing it and having the skills in place. I think there is nothing more to be said about that personally. I think that it is something that is already done.

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): But it is also when you get a number of plots together. Part of the problem with the planning system is that it is on an individual basis. That is why you get the situation in Vauxhall where you had an opportunity to have a decent public space and it was lost, because there was no kind of plan of how all these plots fit together and come to the ground together.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Kings Cross is a good example?

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): Yes, Kings Cross is a very good example of a really high-quality development.

Jane Wernick (Director, Jane Wernick Associates): Kings Cross did have a master plan and it was really something exceptional.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Yes, yes, and there was masses of public consultation over it.

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): Obviously it is easier because it is all owned by the same company. It is obviously more difficult when different plots are owned by different people.

Jane Wernick (Director, Jane Wernick Associates): The Shard was difficult because of different ownerships.

Rowan Moore (Architecture Critic, The Observer): Could I mention South Quays at this point, because this is an area next to Canary Wharf, it ought to be a great case for tall buildings. Tony is applying for the tallest residential building in Britain there. But it is multiple ownerships and Tower Hamlets are desperately trying to get some sort of plan together for South Quays

with the help of the architects Maccreanor Lavington. What is currently due to happen is that everyone is going to apply for their individual towers, including Tony, with a little bit of public realm at the base, and they are not going to get into an argument with Tony about his particular bit of public realm. However, the point is you are going to get very, very dense development if all these things are approved. Way above the levels recommended in the London Plan, and sort of Hong Kong levels, and you are going to get an incredibly fragmented series of public spaces that really do not join up with each other. There is a very striking comparison with Wood Wharf just across the water, which is owned by Canary Wharf Group; where there is much better co- ordination. That is all to do with ownership the fact that Canary Wharf owns the whole site of Wood Wharf, and South Quays is multiple ownership.

Incidentally, this is not exactly about the issue of ground level, however Gerard Maccreanor [founding director, Maccreanor Lavington] has expressed the very great concern that what is going to happen at South Quays is going to be inefficient in terms of development and number of units; because the people who are smart and get in first, like Tony, are likely to get very good consents, but that would make it more difficult for later consents to happen. Therefore you are not necessarily going to get the best provision of numbers in the end. You are going to get a weird combination of dense and not dense.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): How many towers is it, about ten?

Rowan Moore (Architecture Critic, The Observer): I cannot remember exactly how many. However it is a lot. The challenge, and it is a real challenge, is for planners, where you have multiple ownership, to achieve something like the coherence you get from a single ownership. However, it is a public resource. Tower Hamlets are trying to have a series of workshops at New London Architecture and they are struggling to raise £50,000 to have even the workshops to talk about it. Again, it is an area where obviously the investment will be in the hundreds of millions.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Why does the GLA not work with them?

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning): We are. There are 22 sites in South Quay in total; I think it is 22 sites. Not all of those are going to be really tall towers, I hasten to add, but they will all be substantial buildings of one sort or another. There is the South Quays Design Framework, which Tower Hamlets is working on. We ourselves are working on an OAPF for the whole of the Isle of Dogs because we think we need to develop a much broader planning framework for the whole area. This is really where you do get the conflict between the GLA and -- it is not a conflict, sorry, I take that word away. The issue is that we develop the overall planning structure. The planning system says that the local authority should then do the fine-grained work. Therefore it really is Tower Hamlet’s job to do that fine-grained work at Tower Hamlets.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): However, Eddie, we agree the planning frameworks.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning): We agree the planning frameworks.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We also sit on the boards.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning): There is no board on the Isle of Dogs. That is what we are developing with an OAPF for the Isle of Dogs.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): It is a bit late, from what is being said.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning): There are 38 opportunity areas; we are now talking about a 39th, if you do not mind me saying so. We can only take responsibility for so much of London. There are 33 boroughs out there who have to take local responsibility.

Kit Malthouse AM: The Mayor in Tower Hamlets has money to produce a promotional newspaper every week for the area. Why does he not have money to do a proper consultation exercise? I think the beef is with him, not with us.

Stewart Murray (Assistant Director – Planning, GLA): We are meeting Tower Hamlets virtually on a fortnightly/monthly basis on both South Quays design framework and all borough development, particularly on the Isle of Dogs and Poplar. So we are building up a very coherent, robust planning development quantification and design --

Rowan Moore (Architecture Critic, The Observer): Meanwhile one site already has been consented and others are being applied for.

Jane Wernick (Director, Jane Wernick Associates): I just want to ask a naive question. If we are really serious about trying to hit our green targets and avoid catastrophe, in an area like this, where we are really starting from scratch, is this not where we should say, “Right, here we will not go tall, we do not need to. Let us have a master plan where the buildings will be sustainable, they will be using much less energy than if they were tall towers, and they can still make money for the developers”, or, as Julia says, “Let us build some public housing”. It is just again and again we are just saying it is just situation normal. We are completely ignoring what is happening around the globe. I just do not understand. Is this not what this Committee should be thinking about?

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): The Committee is. We are raising it. We are raising all of these issues at the moment.

Stewart Murray (Assistant Director – Planning, GLA): The London Plan policy on, for example, minimising carbon dioxide emissions has increased the target threshold from 25% to 40% and obviously, as Peter Rees identified, this is all getting into building regulations. Therefore those emission targets are ramping up for residential --

Jane Wernick (Director, Jane Wernick Associates): But you will not get zero carbon with a tall tower. You just will not get it.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Yes. We are going to have to take this topic up, I think, in the Environment Committee as well because it is a big topic. I think there is an issue. We do not have an embodied energy policy in the London Plan at the moment, which I think would help with tall buildings.

Shall we now, unless anyone else wants to say anything about the public realm, close by talking, and we have to be very focused, about what recommendations people are making in terms of either the implementation of policy or strengthening the whole way we do this. Now, I think the one that has come through is - since we have been told that the majority of tall buildings will be, we assume, close to good public transport, and will be in opportunity area frameworks, of which we have heard has just been added a 39th - there are very many of these around London and they are in outer London too. They are right across outer London. Barnet is going to have a lot of towers too, 20 towers, therefore it is not just Croydon, going right around. I am a bit foxed by this master planning idea because in fact Kings Cross, which had multiple ownership, had a master plan; had fantastic public scrutiny, Urban Design Assistance Teams (UDAT) were done, weeks, months were spent with people in rooms doing it. Therefore, why can we not do that now for these very important developments?

Stewart Murray (Assistant Director – Planning, GLA): Most of the master planning at Kings Cross was taken forward by Argent, which is a very high-quality courageous architectural development company. Very focused on quality and sustainability, working with the London Borough of Camden and the Borough of Islington, and they took a very long-term approach. Other parts of London, in concert with the boroughs and the GLA, worked very closely on delivery of opportunity areas at a finer grain to deliver high-quality places, including appropriate tall buildings in appropriate locations.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Does fine-grained mean some kind of master planning though? Where the towers will go, how they will relate to each other?

Stewart Murray (Assistant Director – Planning, GLA): It can be a master plan. It could be the developer’s master plan, it is not necessarily a public sector led master plan, however it is in collaboration. These will come forward increasingly in the opportunity areas and town centres.

Navin Shah AM: The question I have is that I accept that the GLA is working with respective boroughs in terms of developing their opportunity area framework, etc. The problem is how committed they are with the local communities in terms of genuine wider consultation. Because, with the outer boroughs I represent, there is a problem, one might say, in terms of attitude towards tall buildings. Forget skyscrapers, when I say tall buildings I am talking about anything over say 10 or 15-storey buildings. Therefore there is that question of suburban attitudes.

Secondly there is that perception that tall buildings are not appropriate for suburban areas. We are talking about strategic views, about local views and the local character of the area that they want to retain. For architects, for planners, this might not be high on their list in terms of quality, however for local communities they are very important to maintain that character and the aspects that they want.

That is where the problem is; that we seem to be imposing, through various sorts of planning structures, those solutions. The worry is that they say, “Fine, OK, you are an opportunity area with very high densities, way above what we would normally prescribe, because you have better transport links, etc. If you are going to end up with tall buildings, which I think you are going to, no matter what the debate is or where it goes; there is going to be a lot of local resistance for all sorts of reasons, and that is where I do not think that we do enough to engage and reassure the local communities that what they will be getting is something that they can live with.

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): However, Navin, ultimately it is down to the borough, as Sir Edward said, there are 32, 33 boroughs out there. They are the fundamental planning authority that have to take their community’s with them, and they will pay for it by the ballot box if they do not. Therefore I think that is a good question; however one that really should be aimed at the boroughs, perhaps, and these guys will contribute.

Navin Shah AM: Again, I think for outer boroughs, is the policy framework adequate enough to allow that sort of local debate and local decision-making?

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): That is a really important point. Where is the voice? There has been quite a lot written already about this during this debate. Where is the voice of local people? Because it goes back again to this -- I think, Peter, why do you not come up with your idea about how we can make the whole thing more visual as well as the master plan?

Peter Murray (Chair, New London Architecture): Knowing what is happening in a strategic way, is really important in terms of how people can comment and understand what is happening. As Stewart says, the whole of London has a planning framework where tall buildings can go. It would be really good to have some way of really understanding that. As I said, in NLA we have a physical model of central London and it is a very good way of ascertaining what is happening in the areas there. We do not have enough space to go out to Shepherds Bush or to Croydon or to other areas where this is happening. However, what we could do is have a central computer model, a three-dimensional computer model of London, where developers can put into that model their own three-dimensional computerised model; this would give a London-wide view of exactly where all these tall buildings were happening and indeed where there might be proposals like Old Oak Common, which are not yet in the planning system but there are images that show that there are likely to be taller buildings there, you could oversee the whole of London. You could see where this is happening, using the computer system you can fly through to see what it is like, both from above, but also go down to ground level and see how these work together. There are systems available. University College London has a very good model of London. There are many private companies that have computer models, however they are very protective of their copyright and their software, where you can see photographic quality images of what places will look like when these new buildings are built.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Is the technology ready?

Peter Murray (Chair, New London Architecture): Yes, absolutely. It is used all the time.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Therefore we could do it. Eddie, we cannot discuss all this now; however this is something we could pick up.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning): We have licences now for certain parts of London. Indeed Old Oak Common is a good example. We already have the licences to produce that kind of imagery. We have it. It is a matter, if you do not mind me saying so, Chairman, of cost and time and all of that, in putting it together.

Peter Murray (Chair, New London Architecture): I think the point is to bring all the bits together really, is it not, to be able to see it in a strategic way.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): All right, that is very helpful.

Tony Pidgley (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): Chair, I think there is going to be a problem here. The thing is the boroughs, we as a group do not go anywhere that we do not master plan, we have Portakabins that we set up, we man them and we invite the residents. Because, if we do not invite the residents, they have such a powerful voice, they know in two minutes what is going on. We have to be careful we do not get more rules and regulations. Tall buildings are not (inaudible) -- they are part of it at the end of the day. We have learned many lessons over architecture and I hope that is improved. However, I do think that you have to look at the master plan and the way it comes about and how we get there. We are about to put in the provision. However it is a learning curve at the end of the day. The problem with the debate is, and we have never got to that here, that was all about the £70 million to build the theatre. The height climbed and you had to have the theatre or you had the height. This debate goes on, Nicky, like we--

Tom Copley AM: --That was something about the viability test,

Tony Pidgley CBE (Chairman, Berkeley Group plc): --we’ve got to have the debate.

Tom Copley AM: There is a price to be paid.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning): Chairman, could I just come in on Navin Shah’s point, if I may? Just to be absolutely clear, the opportunity area frameworks, which we put together, and they are led by City Hall, are done in conjunction with the boroughs, very closely with the boroughs in fact. If I may use the example from your own constituency of Brent, and we look at say the Wembley one. That was very much put together with Brent Council. Brent Council led on that. Brent Council led on the consultation of that. That has tall buildings. They are fairly substantial around Brent. Therefore it is done with local people. I do not want anybody to think this is just done here in this office and we are in isolation to everybody.

Navin Shah AM: Chair, I am not questioning, in fact I did not make my comment very clear that, yes, you are working with the boroughs. What I am saying is that that is a classic very good example of a successful regeneration. The other part of my constituency is Harrow, for

example, where there is new opportunity area, which has got huge amount of constraints, and that is where I think the challenges are; and that is where there is the perception of local community, local residents, that are not being consulted enough. The same could apply for other areas, and I think it is important what Tony [Pidgley] described as buy-in from the local community of what we are going to plan for them.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning): I accept that, however just to make the point that Harrow is a very new one. We have not started that process yet. There are some amazing sites in Harrow.

Navin Shah AM: Sure.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): I want to keep to the general, because we have very little time left. Sunand, you are on the Mayor’s Design Advisory Group. Do you see these opportunity area frameworks? How close to master planning are they?

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): We have asked, just yesterday, to have greater scrutiny of them, and we have been promised those. We have seen them in the past. However we need to work out a format in which we can be really effective. It is no good presenting it to a body like this, you have to really get down into it and understand it, and there are ideas underway for that.

Stewart Murray (Assistant Director – Planning, GLA): Yes, we are drawing up, because of the London Plan alterations for an examination in public (EIP) in September. There are five proposed new opportunity areas in London and we are going to bring to the Mayor’s Design Advisory Group the new programme for bringing forward those Opportunity Area Planning Frameworks.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): OK, but it is just advice again, is it not?

Stewart Murray (Assistant Director – Planning, GLA): We have presented emerging Opportunity Area Planning Frameworks such as Old Oak Common and others; and also we had a presentation this week on other areas of intensification, such as town centres, which I think one should not forget as well. Often they are opportunity areas as well.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): I think we have to move this on to a sort of design review type of basis rather than a friendly chat, presentation and a few questions and answers (Q&As). I think that they need to be examined critically in peer review. That is something that I think we can do through the Design Advisory Group, however of course it relies hugely on people’s voluntary time to get down into it. Therefore we are thinking of how subgroups can take on different OAPFs.

Colin Wilson (Senior Manager, Planning Decisions, GLA): Can I just say, they do get design-reviewed by the boroughs’ design review panels. Old Oak gets design-reviewed by Hammersmith and Fulham’s design review panel, for instance. Historically, they were design- reviewed by Ken [Livingstone, former Mayor of London]. Therefore they are subject to scrutiny

by design panels. Just another brief point as well: on the Kings Cross master plan, there are two buildings at the back of the Kings Cross master plan, one is student housing and one is affordable housing, and neither of them were in the original master plan. There were variations of the master plan and they were a reaction to a recession. I think it beautifully illustrates, even where you have one single owner in one master plan area, master plans have to be flexible and robust enough to react to circumstances in time; and it impossible to fix all things at one point in time.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): That is one of the flaws of the planning system that there is not consultation when things have changed sufficiently. Julia, you wanted to come in?

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): Just very quickly. I think part of the problem is not all planning authorities have design review. I think it is quite patchy. I think there is also a question about lack of resources in planning departments now that they do not have the resources to do it as well as they, I am sure, would like. The other thing is timing. It needs to be done before. I think the problem with a lot of these questions is that they come and they do it when it is all too late, it has all happened. That has definitely happened in Vauxhall and certainly in Earls Court as well. They were kind of running to catch up with the developers and slowly building their master plan and they never quite caught up I felt.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): That is often the experience.

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): It is timing.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We are getting all these points. We are getting them down. Do you want to talk about the Skyline commission for a moment, Peter?

Peter Murray (Chair, New London Architecture): We have heard about architectural quality, which is an essential part, and we have heard about how you bring clusters together; and how you need to get architects working together to make sure that those clusters do provide the best-quality architecture. I think that, to provide some stronger design assistance to the Mayor in the way of the Design Advisory Group, maybe strengthening the advisory group, but bringing together a group of wise men and women. I am not sure only peer review is an answer, however I think a broader body of people who can assist in terms of both making sure that the quality of design is right; but also there is this strategic and transparent view of what is going on right across London.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): What sort of professions would you bring in? Quickly rattle them off, please.

Peter Murray (Chair, New London Architecture): Engineers, architects as well obviously, urban designers, planners obviously, and also people who have real interest and concern about what is happening to London and the future of London.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Community representatives, landscape engineers?

Peter Murray (Chair, New London Architecture): Indeed, landscape --

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Now, I want more points about the policy.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): Can I make a policy proposal to think about. This is specifically about residential, which is that if a tower is proposed or a tower is thought about, to address density issues, then it should be required that alternative methods of achieving the same goals and densities should be demonstrated, shown and considered, as a prior condition; so that it is not immediately seen as the answer, but that alternatives should be presented, which is normal policy in so much of good governance, design and implementation of property moves. That is my suggestion.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): It is a very interesting suggestion.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning): Sorry, could I put a sort of argument against, if I may? The argument against is that people, some people, not everybody and nobody is arguing that families should be put in tower blocks, like tall buildings. There is a market out there and whether you take, whichever set of numbers you take, if you take Rowan’s number of 27%, 27% of people do want to live, or like to live, in a tall building. Therefore it is wrong to be anti-tall building. I think the argument should be where the tall buildings should go and we come back to the beginning of our argument, which is that we very much argued the clustering of tall buildings.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): But then another argument is, Sunand, you had better respond to that.

Sunand Prasad (Architect, Penoyre & Prasad Architects): Although 27% of people like the idea of living in towers, however it does not mean that saying the 27% of people dislike the idea of living in any other way. Therefore, the point here is back to the second question that we addressed, is this a solution to London’s housing crisis? Is this a solution to finding the right densities? One way to find out is that, if such a proposal is made, yes, of course, if the justification is that we have a queue of people wanting to live only in tall buildings, then that may well be the answer to London’s housing crisis. If it is just in terms of getting the numbers in, we have to go tall, I would like to say, “OK, show me some other way before I accept that argument”. That is all it is.

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): Can I just come in, because in suburban boroughs the either/or may be concreting over green space in back gardens. By clustering in district centres, be it at Kingston or be it at Croydon or be it Bromley town centre, achieving housing targets, assuming people want to live there, that will take pressure off, and this is very politically delicate for all sorts of boroughs of different views.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We did have a point earlier where quite a lot of points were made about how you can achieve the same density because (inaudible) --

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): It was a point made, however not necessarily proven.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): If 20% of people want to live in tall buildings, 100% of people have to put up with the tall buildings because they live with it on the outside. Let us not forget that. There is a common misapprehension that building tall buildings will improve your economy. In the 1980s Frankfurt was a quiet market town. It produced a wonderfully thorough German master plan for skyscrapers and now Frankfurt is a quiet market town with skyscrapers. It made no difference whatever to the success of Frankfurt. Only build tall as a last resort. Only build tall when you have run out of land for the people that need to be located where you are. If there is any other solution for achieving the density, use that first. Therefore an opportunity area should not, in my mind, be equated with a need for tall buildings.

Steve O’Connell (Deputy Chair): Chair, we are rehashing the earlier debate.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We are on to talking about different policies. You talked about a policy earlier, Peter, about not saying where you should not have the building.

Peter Rees (Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett, UCL): Yes, however I was thinking that there is scope for more constraint, as Dr Barker was saying. There are more views in London that need to be protected. The city of London never had any difficulty at all dealing with the planning constraints of the protected views and the sensitivities that exist around the historic core of London in producing a cluster of towers.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Protect more views. Height has been mentioned. Have you got any other points, Julia or Rowan?

Rowan Moore (architecture critic, The Observer): Yes. I think it is quite fundamental that we do, as a number of people said, have a lot of policy about tall buildings, both London-wide and local to boroughs. What is lacking is firstly a real overview of what the cumulative effect of those policies really is. We are just discovering it by trial and error what it means. Therefore, in a way, the whole of London has been designed by the planning system, however kind of more or less by accident, or partly by accident. Therefore there are consequences of existing policy that turn out to be things like this. Therefore, there should be a real fundamental review firstly of what do we have, and Peter’s digital model will be a very useful tool in that. What does the London that has been designed, partly by accident, look like? Then we can say: do we like it? Then we can say what might change. That is a big job, it will take time. However, relative to the scale of investment that we are talking about, relative to the importance of the issue, I do not think that is an unreasonable use of resources. I think that is a job for the Mayor and the GLA. So the London Plan, going back to its first publication, says various things about tall buildings, where they might be. However that was never visualised. The images that NLA and The Observer produced and published of what a part of London is going to look like, could have been made 10 or 15 years ago. Then we could have had a much more informed discussion about this whole subject. Instead of which, it has kind of slid though under the door, if you like. With consultation people keep talking about local consultation. However it is London-wide consultation that is lacking.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Yes, we needed it at all levels.

Rowan Moore (architecture critic, The Observer): Of course, the London Plan was consulted on. However, it was not visualised. People could not see what it meant.

Kit Malthouse AM: To be fair, there was a website, or there is, called skyscrapers.net, which does visualise the skyline of London and has done for a long time. In fact it is the reason I wrote an article in the Times back in 2007 saying we are building too many tall buildings. However it was not publicly available, I agree with you.

Stewart Murray (Assistant Director – Planning, GLA): With all due respect, Chair, I think it would be impossible ten to 15 years ago or in the first iteration of the London Plan to visualise the changes that would come forward. However we set the framework, the boroughs do the finer grain, and we work together on the policies. The developers come forward with the master plans and the architects design the individual buildings.

Rowan Moore (architecture critic, The Observer): Chair, if you say Vauxhall, Blackfriars, Waterloo, are opportunity areas, which gets translated into areas of tall buildings, which is a bit of a sleight of hand, then it is not that difficult to have some sort of visualisation of --

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We got the message about visualisation. Ken [Livingstone, former Mayor of London], at the very most, gave permission, it is very hard to get the numbers, for about 20, because of course they would come forward from the boroughs. Although in fact these are the strategic ones, and I think there has been an answer, Boris Johnson, Eddie, I think it is about 200. It does not mean they will all be built of course.

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning): Can we just put these statistics right? The Mayor has turned down almost as many towers as he has approved. Just to be quite clear about this, it is not an automatic process that every tower gets approval. That is not true.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): I am just making the point about how many have been approved and, as I said, it does not mean that they will necessarily all be built; it is just so that you get some idea.

Colin Wilson (Senior Manager, Planning Decisions, GLA): Nicky, in referrals for tall buildings to Ken, there were 460 over two terms; and in a term and a half to Boris there have been 360, so pro rata it will be the same amount of tall building referrals to Boris as there had been to Ken over an eight-year period.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Sorry, I missed how many referrals.

Colin Wilson (Senior Manager, Planning Decisions, GLA): The number of tall building referrals is quite consistent actually over --

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Sixty or 160?

Colin Wilson (Senior Manager, Planning Decisions, GLA): It was 460 referrals for tall buildings that you saw with Ken.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): However, we only gave permission for about 20.

Colin Wilson (Senior Manager, Planning Decisions, GLA): I think it was probably rather more than that.

Kit Malthouse AM: Yes, but Nicky, you were trying to make a point, you were saying somehow Ken was calm and controlled and somehow Boris isn’t; which is just not true.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Ken was famously fond of tall buildings, but he did agonise about some.

Navin Shah AM: Are we not moving away from the real debate and real issues, it is not about how many, it is about what is the right solution to the housing crisis. Are tall buildings appropriate? What impact does it have on the skyline? Are they sustainable, and so on? Not whether how many did Ken approve and what is Boris approving. That is not really the issue. The issue is about --

Kit Malthouse AM: There is a point about who initially took the cork out of the champagne bottle, and that was definitely Ken. Very hard to put that cork back once it is out.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): Are there any more points on policies that we either want implemented better or that we want to strengthen or toughen?

Julia Barfield (Managing Director, Marks Barfield Architects): Can I just make a quick point about clusters, because I think I have heard a rumour that the Shard is going to get used as an excuse to create a cluster around it, and I just think that would be a real shame. I think there are cases to say that sometimes single builds should be left as single buildings, and I think that is true of Centrepoint, because Centrepoint is at a major crossroads in the city and I do not think that there should be a cluster around that. I do not think it is classed as clusters every time. I think they are good most of the --

Sir Edward Lister (Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning): I think I am right in saying that there are two planning permissions already in existence for tall buildings around the Shard. They go back quite a long time. They have been around for a while.

Nicky Gavron AM (Chair): We have collected a lot of points on the way, which have not all been reiterated now I think we have a lot of points under the policy heading and we are just going to have to go away and work out how we are going to put these together, and then discuss them with the Mayor’s Office.

Our next meeting is going to be on Old Oak Common where, from what we have heard, we are going to be able to see some of this properly with this new visual technology. However, , I just want to thank everyone because this subject is such a hot debate; and you can all tell from all the passion and the amount of contributions there have been that we are really trying to get through it and come up with something that will be useful to London and Londoners. Thank you very much, all of you.