Appendix 1 London Assembly Regeneration Committee - Wednesday 9 October 2019 Transcript of Agenda item 5 – Public Land Disposals and Regeneration Tony Devenish AM (Chairman): We have quickly moved on to the most substantive item today. I welcome each of our guests: working from my left to right, Peter Lewis, Interim Chief Finance Officer, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC); Matthew Punshon, Interim Director of Estate Strategy, Metropolitan Police Service (MPS); Sue Budden, Director of Corporate Services, London Fire Brigade (LFB); from our home team James Murray, Deputy Mayor [for Housing and Residential Development], and Justin Carr, Assistant Director [of Public Land, Greater London Authority (GLA)]; David Gooch from Network Homes; Martin Rooney from the National Health Service (NHS); and Lester Hampson from Transport for London (TfL). Welcome. All right. Shall we start with the questions? Let us go straight into it. Each of you - MOPAC, the LFB and the NHS - can answer in turn. Could you briefly describe the estate ownership structure in your public body and the mechanism you have in place to identify and bring surplus land to market, please? Who would like to kick off? Sue? Sue Budden (Director of Corporate Services, LFB): I can do [that]. We are probably the simpler of the organisations [in terms of estates] in front of you. The majority of our estate now is fire stations and so our estate is operational, owned by the London Fire Commissioner (LFC), Dany Cotton. The governance structure above that is through the Deputy Mayor [for Fire and Resilience] to the Mayor. Any acquisitions or disposals to have to be prior approved by the Deputy Mayor [for Fire and Resilience] before the LFC takes the final decision. That is our structure. Our estates strategy is much more about refurbishing and the quality of the estate to make it fit for operational purposes rather than disposals. We did go through a disposal process following our Fifth London Safety Plan but we do not have any further plans at the moment to close stations or dispose of land. Tony Devenish AM (Chairman): I will not ask you the first part of the next bit of the question, but could you provide an indication of the potential for disposal and delivery over the next three to five years? Is there anything coming forth? Sue Budden (Director of Corporate Services, LFB): We have a couple of tiny sites that have masts on them and there is an underground toilet in Brompton. They are really de minimis sites now. We do not have anything coming up. Tony Devenish AM (Chairman): Thank you. The MPS, please? Peter Lewis (Interim Chief Finance Officer, MOPAC): Perhaps if I can take the first part of the question, Chairman, in terms of the structure, the land holding is via MOPAC. It is responsible for the property portfolio and clearly a very similar structure to the LFC in the sense of decision-making through the Deputy Mayor [for Policing and Crime] as appropriate. Identification of operational requirements feeds into that. Perhaps if I can ask my colleague Matthew to talk to you about how surplus sites are identified, you will get a fuller answer. Tony Devenish AM (Chairman): Thank you. Matthew Punshon (Interim Director of Estate Strategy, MPS): Thank you, Chairman. We have over the last 10 years had two sets of estate strategies focusing on the agenda of reduction. The first part of the estate strategy was looking really at rationalising the estate and pushing people into corners where we could create space. The second part, which is the more critical part, over the last three years has been focused on an operational transformation that has been happening within the MPS. Once we sold New Scotland Yard, we raised enough cash to start buying the mobile technology that we needed to have, which fundamentally changed the way that we operate and enabled us to consolidate into a larger set of buildings. We start out with a requirement from the operations. The Estates Team then focuses on where that requirement will land into the estate and then the utilisation of that estate, meeting utilisation targets, standard government property agency type targets, which throws up a series of surplus properties, generally the smaller properties around but not necessarily all smaller properties. We have sitting at the moment in our disposal list about 75 properties for disposal. The three big ones are Paddington Green and two sites at Hendon still. The question at the moment is that we are revising our entire estate strategy in the light of the Prime Minister’s [The Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP] announcement of the uplift of 20,000 police officers. As you may be aware, the Mayor has asked for 6,000 officers from that, which will also include between 1,000 and 2,000 additional staff. That requires a fundamental look at the estate. That being said, the strategy does not change that much because the consolidation down into larger buildings and having more mobile offices is the key. If you look at our estate over the next 10 years, there may be a few sites that we will retain that are currently on the disposal list, but the bulk – my guess at the moment and it is still under review – will remain on the disposal list. To give an indication of size, apart from the big ones we spoke about – Paddington Green and Hendon are about 50% of our estate with about 1,200 expected units to be built on those two sites – the rest are spread across the other 70-odd sites with a rough average of 20 to 25 units per site. Tony Devenish AM (Chairman): Great, thank you. The NHS? Martin Rooney (Director of Partnerships, Strategic Estates Planning Service, NHS): Hello. I am here as a representative of the national Strategic Estates Planning Team in the NHS and so some of my observations are based on the national picture. I am happy to do my best to answer London-specific queries. In relation to our ownership structure, it is possibly fair to say that it is more complex than some of the descriptions you have already heard today. Across almost 30 individual NHS trust organisations and NHS Property Services, there are a whole series of different estate ownership models and plans in place. The question was around how sites are potentially identified as surplus and taken forward for disposal. There is an NHS-wide policy called the Estates Code, which defines how sites are identified, brought forward and ultimately disposed of in order to secure best value. I guess the key message in relation to the question is that at the moment in the NHS we are trying to drive and derive surplus land and efficiency through estates management on the back of a clinically led and service-led change to NHS services. We are doing that across five sustainability and transformation partnership (STP) level estate strategies. In each of those estate strategies, there is an efficiency drive and a disposable plan and pipeline. Ultimately, because of the requirements of the Estates Code that I mentioned a minute or two ago, organisations are required to bring forward sites that are known to be surplus. Once they are declared surplus, they go through a fairly well-established process of advertising sites for other public sector use first before releasing them onto the open market. I am happy to elaborate a little bit further on that as part of the discussion. Does that answer the question? Tony Devenish AM (Chairman): Yes, for now. James, you have been in post now for three years and you are working to your main target of building the houses you need to build, but how have you worked with each of these three bodies to simplify the process and try to drive forward the disposal of sites and more mixed developments and particularly housing? James Murray (Deputy Mayor for Housing and Residential Development): We found very clearly when we came into office that, although public sector landowners might know where some of their land holdings are, the really hard bit is to work out which are surplus or to actually make them surplus by consolidating, reorganising and changing how services are delivered. That is actually the really hard work. Finding the ownership is not the easy bit and I do not want to imply that any of it is easy, but the real hard work lies in working out which sites are surplus and which can be brought forward for housing. We have been having very much close working relationships with the individual public sector landowners, whether that is the NHS trusts across London. Rather than going in right at the top and trying to get an agreement from the Secretary of State or someone at the Cabinet Office to order an NHS trust to do something, we have found it much more effective to be working with the NHS trusts more from the bottom up to work out what their strategies are for their sites. A good example is working with the mental health trust around the St Ann’s Hospital site in Haringey. We came to a really good solution there, whereby the mental health trust got the capital receipt that it needed for its new health facilities and we got control of the site, which is now out to tender on the London Development Panel. Another good example is the Whittington Health Trust, which is at a much earlier state of progression, but we are working with the Whittington Health Trust and look at all of the operations on its estate to see whether at some point there will be some land that can be used for housing in a way that we might support.