25
Examination of witnesses
Anne Ogundiya, Kathryn Firth and Katja Stille.
Q92 The Chair: Good morning and welcome to our eighth public meeting of the Built Environment Committee in the House of Lords. We are here today to talk about master planning as part of our inquiry into the new towns programme, which the Government have set out. We are delighted to welcome yet again some fantastic witnesses here today. Can you introduce yourselves and where you are from?
Katja Stille: Good morning, everyone. I am a director at Tibbalds Planning and Urban Design. We are a consultancy of architects, planners and urban designers working mostly on creating new communities or improving existing ones with a focus on quality and health. The most notable projects are Northstowe—it is a new town that we are working on, which you may have heard about—and Otterpool Park, which I know was mentioned in previous sessions, as well as a new settlement in East Devon.
Anne Ogundiya: I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the discussion. My evidence will, I suppose, draw on over 30 years of experience in planning and regeneration, starting with the Olympic Delivery Authority where I helped to deliver the 2012 Games, then moving on to the London Legacy Development Corporation, where I worked on the local planning authority side, leading on planning and transformation strategy. I am currently at Beyond the Red Line, where we focus on design quality and inclusive, people-centred master planning and regeneration.
Kathryn Firth: Thank you very much for inviting me to give evidence. I am an architect and urban designer. I am a director at Arup under the cities, planning & design group. I also chair a number of design review panels, and I teach at UCL and Central Saint Martins.
Arup is a multidisciplinary company. We have the advantage of, under one roof, being able to draw on the many disciplines that are important to collaborate on when creating master plans. We are doing a number of town extensions right now that are related to rail infrastructure.
The Chair: Welcome again to our meeting; thank you for coming in today. We have a series of questions, which you know about. We are interested in certain areas of master planning. If you feel at any stage that a question has already been answered by one of your colleagues or you do not have anything to add, please just say so; this is important for your time and ours. If we can keep questions and answers as short as possible, that would be appreciated. We have cranked up the heating to make you sweat out the answers a bit more but, first, we will turn to Lord Mawson.
Q93 Lord Mawson: Good morning. My questions are on master planning. How can the master planning process reduce risk and ensure the long-term economic viability of sites? How do you ensure that this master plan is deeply rooted in place and is not something that is just arriving from Mars or from the ideological assumptions of architects?
Kathryn Firth: I am happy to kick off. It is interesting that you use that phrase because I always use it; if something feels like it has landed from another planet, we have a problem.
Master planning should, from the outset, be integrated with the business case for a place. I am a big advocate of place-led growth. That is key. Master planning needs, from the outset, to involve integrated thinking, which helps to ensure the creation of high-quality places and communities. It is not just about homes, of course; it considers social infrastructure, access to education and green spaces. All of these things, when thought about holistically, are what help longer-term economic viability. We always need to integrate these elements, with economic planning and sustainability, so that we can lay the foundations for what we have learned creates healthy and thriving neighbourhoods.
The master plan process is fantastic as a way to test propositions. You can take a holistic vision and, in a sense, through doing capacity testing and testing the ingredients, that then provides assurance. As you come out with various propositions, you can provide assurance through this process to the public sector, the market and the potential investors—basically, the people and organisations that are going to deliver new places.
New towns need to be located strategically to maximise growth and attract investment. You say that they should not land from Mars. They need to relate to their context; to me, part of that context is having critical infrastructure nearby, which is so important. That will feed into the success and reduce the risk. It is much more likely to attract the economic drivers that one needs. As I say, it is very important.
Although I like to think that designers have all the answers, we do not always have them. We need to work with those who understand current and future market trends to inform the land uses of a site, which goes right down to the types and tenures of housing. The advantage of the master planning process is that you can build off economies of scale, but there is also a kind of phasing and testing that allows you to look at the economic viability. You can then adjust over time. You never build the whole settlement all at once, so that allows you to identify the catalytic economic drivers. At the same time, the masterplan is dynamic; cities are dynamic. I will stop there and let others add to that.
Anne Ogundiya: I agree with that, but I would probably answer the question differently by trying to clarify the risk. What do we mean? It means different things to different people. For the Government, the principal risk will be around non-delivery or slow buildout, which can undermine housing targets or lead to reputational damage. There is also a risk with respect to the huge infrastructure costs that could have been ploughed into the master plan.
For communities, it is important that we think about the people for whom we are master planning. Risk means displacement, possibly insufficient infrastructure and erosion of trust. If places are developed without consideration for existing or future residents’ needs, they may become symbols of exclusion or missed opportunity.
For developers—we probably know this anyway—the risk is primarily financial. It is going to be about linking to uncertain policy frameworks, inconsistent local governance and viability concerns. Delays in infrastructure delivery or shifting regulatory requirements can destabilise investment and delay or derail development phases.
I hope Lord Mawson will agree with me, from being on the board at LLDC and on our planning committee, that we apply those principles differently. What we try to do is mitigate all three of those categories of risk. We look to do things somewhat differently. With the main master plan, which we call the legacy community scheme master plan, we used a robust planning framework to ensure that development momentum would not compromise quality.
There is no ideal approach, I guess, but the most important factor, if you are a developer or a public body, is access to long-term patient capital, as there will not be a financial return until several years into that delivery programme. The most robust process would be public ownership of the land. I would suggest—coming from a development corporation—that it should be a development corporation because it would have access to low-cost borrowing or bond finance to fund the strategic infrastructure, with payback from the sale of service plots to a variety of private sector or investment sector housebuilders and developers, including co-housing groups and self-builders. That is what I put to the committee.
Something that I would like to re-emphasise to the committee is that everyone has a risk profile. Everyone has to do their due diligence. What a master plan does, and can do, to eliminate risk is getting that planning permission. The power and value of getting a planning permission in your hands cannot be underestimated. It gives certainty to the developer, which I have just talked about; it establishes clearly the value of the land to be developed; and it provides confidence for the developer, the planning authority and the communities that I talked about.
I would say that those are the ways you can minimise risk. You cannot eliminate it entirely, but I would suggest that those things are helpful. You can have a master plan framework and a master plan strategy—they are great things as statements of intent—but it is the planning permission that the developer wants, and that the local planning authority wants to issue, which actually does the job of minimising that risk.
Katja Stille: I agree with most of what has been said; I do not want to repeat it. To clarify, for me, the master plan is not a blueprint but a framework for change, the physical, social and economic change. It also has to establish a physical and spatial vision—one that can be embraced by the community, by developers and by investors so that you build a platform from which to move forward into the delivery stage.
It is the master plan process that is your main de-risking tool. It is not just the designers doing their drawings; it is the partnership working. The master plan process has to balance different conflicts and pressures such as the environment with needing to build lots of homes with open space and facilities, transport impacts and so on. It is that balancing process that is the first stage to de-risking.
It is also about balancing a town’s short-term viability with its long-term economic success, because they are very different. What might make the town successful in the future might actually undermine your short-term viability. It is that balancing and trading off, in a way, that is really important. You have to have everybody in the room to do that, so that everybody has bought into that vision
In terms of new places being based in their context, one very practical example is that, at the moment, we see a lot of homogeneous developments around the country. Outside of urban settlements on green field sites, it is pretty much suburban, semi-detached and detached houses everywhere. Communities really do not like that because it looks like it could be anywhere; it also does not reflect our historic environments, which are really rich in character and have townhouses, mews streets and apartments. They are really rich, but what we are building at the moment is either semi-detached and detached or almost 100% flatted. There is a missing middle; that is what we need to rediscover and bring into the master plans. Also, by creating that range and that housing offer—in this case, from flats to terraces, with everything as compact urban forms—we can de-risk the long-term viability because markets change. They will change over a build-up of time of 10 or 20-plus years.
We have seen examples in Cambridgeshire of developers having a great variety of house types on purpose because they knew that the markets would change and that, by not just building semi-detached, for example, they would have greater resilience in the market. They could also reach a greater market in terms of the diversity of people who wanted to buy those buildings. This is one part that is, for me, incredibly helpful for placing developments in context, for learning from our historic environments and for de-risking the long-term economics of that.
One other element that I want to mention are the facilities in local centres. It is incredibly difficult to deliver a new town centre in a place that did not exist before. I do not think that we, as a development profession, have cracked it yet, in terms of how we do it, but master plans can help with the phasing—for example, looking at how we can phase the development to create those facilities, which will not be viable until there is a big population but which our communities need from day one.
In some examples that we have seen, the facilities were not delivered in phase one and it really undermined the confidence of developers and investors in that place. They stalled. So, it is about finding a way through local centres first, with phasing and meanwhile uses, to make sure that our communities have the facilities they need and that those places do not have bad stigma because there is nothing for people to do or to access.
Q94 Lord Porter of Spalding: Is master planning really that hard, though? I know that that sounds a bit provocative but, surely, with all the tech that is out there now—with digital twinning and all of the dragging data down; everybody has a database about everything, everywhere, and can drag that in—you should be able to design a place, knock it down on the computer in two minutes, stick it up again, orientate a building differently to see what its performance is, shift the road around and move a school from somewhere to somewhere else.
Do not get me wrong, I cannot do it—my technological skills are that I can switch something on and off; that is about as far as I can go—but, if I were good with tech, would I not be able to build a place and take it apart, then do that again quite quickly and keep it live so that, as we started the process, we could test in reality whether something was in the right place—or, indeed, “You don’t need to build that part over there now because we know this bit is sufficient”? Is that not the world we are moving into now, rather than having good architects who put nice two-dimensional things together? Is it not going to be stretched more?
There is one thing that I really wanted to ask, but I had to dress it up with another question first because they have a pop at me if I do not do that. If they announce 10 before we go on our summer holidays, how long is it before somebody goes, “Right, that shovel or that 360 digger is putting a hole in that site”? How long do you think it will before we get from a principled place to a started site?
Katja Stille: Starting with the first element—the master plans that we take forward—the drawing is probably not the time-consuming thing. It is the talking to people. It is the agreeing of principles. It is the talking to the highway authorities on the strategy for people to move around. It is about trying to get the funding and the certainty around the public realm in terms of public transport investment. It is the commercial testing. It is all of that, which is much more time consuming than actually putting pen to paper.
In reality, we probably do not get the time we want to design these places. It is about that negotiation process, which is incredibly important and it is hard to shortcut that because, if you do not agree things in the first place and bring people with you, it will probably cause issues later.
On how long it takes, it depends on where those 10 towns are. I know that a lot of potential towns have put prospectuses forward and are already starting. They might be spade ready—ready to go. A master plan and an outline application can take two to three years, depending on how many houses and how big the issues are. It is a hard question to answer without knowing the specific project.
Anne Ogundiya: On your first point, AI can perhaps create a Sims world, if you like, with a master plan but actually, in terms of whether it will be a place that people will want to live in and visit—one that has people and communities as its focus—I would probably say no.
I go back to a lot of what we did at the LLDC. Much of the great master planning and the great place that you see today comes down to the leadership, vision, value and culture of the organisation, which included sustainability and design quality right at its heart. The core values of the organisation, or whoever is doing that master plan, must come into it. They must be embedded in design quality, wanting to make a better place and doing innovative things. For example, the LLDC pioneered innovative engagement in terms of women and girls’ safety work; I do not know that AI would be able to do that.
That was about trying to shape. It was about making sure that we had gender-neutral design work going into this master planning, to make sure that we were delivering for the people who were going to live in these places. That was done because there was a vision: there was an objective of delivering great place-making. You always need to look at ways to be innovative; it is people who can generally do that. In the case of the LLDC, it was done corporately. It was ambitious. That is how I would respond to that part of your question—I shall not say yes.
Kathryn Firth: Anne and Katja have really hit the nail on the head. It is very much about embedding quality. It is not just a quantitative exercise. We are experimenting with AI. It is a tool, not an end in itself. We get this every time a technological innovation comes out: there is a danger that people see it as an end in itself. I am old enough to know when CAD—computer-aided drawing—arrived. Suddenly, people went, “I can draw a straight line. I’m finished now”. It is about understanding how to use that tool.
There is still a human side. Perhaps I am being romantic about it, but there is still that human interaction, engagement and consultation. That is what makes places. It goes to your question, Lord Mawson, about what makes a place specific. How do we stop them from looking like they come from Mars or like they have all come from the same planet? It is through highlighting the specifics of a place. AI is probably getting better at that—you can feed it that information—but it does not have that dialogue.
It is nice of Anne to call out the study, because Arup were the ones who walked with the women across the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. There are things that you learn from those interactions where we are not quite there when it comes to technology. It is not going to give us the answer.
In terms of the length of time before spades in the ground, we have all heard a lot about issues around planning departments having the right resource; that is something that is going to be really important. If we want this to happen at pace, we need to make sure that people in the relevant planning departments and authorities have the right resource to respond in a rigorous way to applications as they come in; that will affect the speed as well, on top of what else has been mentioned.
Lord Porter of Spalding: I was not for one minute advocating for us getting rid of all the clever people who can do the planning bit. I just wanted somebody to articulate the fact that, as much as we can do with tech, we are still going to need people who have soul to go with the machines, so thanks for that.
If we were to recommend anything—there is this list of recommendations that we keep playing with—should we recommend that, once they have announced the places where they want things to be built, the Government should make a point of making sure that the authorities responsible for the planning side of it are resourced up? This would almost certainly require the Government either to buy in new people or at least to have the decency to start giving extra money to train people in those areas, but it would mean that, when the process is ready to go live, it is in place.
Q95 Lord Mawson: I am going to make two quick points. One is about the Olympic Park. When we had our first meeting on the Olympic Park in 1999, which involved a few of us in a room, we realised that large parts of the public sector had absolutely forgotten about the significance of the Lower Lea Valley. It is 6.5 miles of waterways. Those waterways had run the economy there for nearly 2,000 years, with the dock. All that, and its whole history of innovation, had been forgotten. It was people, actually, who began to worry about that; I am not sure that machines would have done.
Also, the development Sadiq Khan calls East Bank—it is actually an innovation district—is interesting. It was Mark Bostock at Arup and three of us who began to worry about this: how do you connect universities that are landlocked in West London and businesses and bring them into East London, and think about the connections between culture, business, arts, and the London College of Fashion?” It was a person, and Mark obviously brought loads of historic knowledge. He worked with Michael Heseltine originally on suggesting the link into Europe. It did not come from Waterloo. It came from St Pancras.
My point is that the people and the detail of a place really matter. I worry a bit—I do not know whether this is your experience—that a lot of these processes of the public sector, which I can see in government, all use the right words but, when you drill into the detail of what they are doing, they have forgotten the meaning of these words. They are ticking boxes, but they are missing the creative fabric that will make a decent master plan that is rooted in a place. Is that fair, do you think?
The Chair: Katja, do you want to say something?
Katja Stille: Yes, but in response to what Lord Porter of Spalding was saying.
Kathryn Firth: I think that that is fair. I think it was Anne who mentioned people’s perception of a place. That is really important. I used to take students out to that area[1] when it had cars turned upside down in the water and it was very much an “out of sight, out of mind” place. I remember taking a group from UCL on an early bus ride because, at that point, there was no way they would consider being way out there. I wanted to tell them about the site. I said, “Stop me if I am going to say things that you already know”. The guy leading the group said, “Just assume that none of us know anything about anything this far east”.
With the new towns, that becomes really interesting because, again, as you were saying, it was very much a transport-led initiative, but it was the people understanding the change that that could make, which is why I would say the same in terms of having a similar strategy. The taskforce will do what it will do, but the strategy is absolutely critical in terms of starting with that combination of the connectivity that either already exists or will exist shortly—because that is what gives people access to opportunity—and the aspirations for a particular area.
Katja Stille: Quickly, you mentioned resourcing the planning authorities. That is absolutely critical, but equally critical for me is unlocking the infrastructure. We see developments not coming forward because there is not enough water or energy, or the public transport is missing. Those things take much longer than building houses. We really need to focus on infrastructure and unlock that, then the process will hopefully move much quicker.
Anne Ogundiya: If I might add to that point, the LLDC stepped in to initiate the direct and accelerated delivery of a lot of the infrastructure. Without it, a lot of what you see would not have happened. Transport, schools, the public realm—all of those things were put in place. It is a heavy lift for the new town and for the development corporation, but, if you want the master plan to succeed, you have to be able to do that.
I talked about funding streams and mechanisms at the beginning. If you, as a development corporation of new towns or whatever, have governance and stewardship in that, you get your returns—albeit over the longer term, but you are prepared to wait. You have that patience, if you like. That is important.
To Kathryn’s point about bringing forward stations, I remember clearly that one of the first things we did at the London Legacy Development Corporation as part of the legacy was delivering Hackney Wick Station. It was the first time that we brought a design review body into that process; we worked really hard and got a great, award-winning scheme. I will not go into the ins and outs of that, but what was really great was that it gave the locals and the community a sense of being in place. They then realised that the legacy they had heard about was not being done to them but was for them. They were engaged in the process because we set up a whole host of panels, which we could probably talk about, that they felt part of; that is really important.
The Chair: Before we move on to the next question, we have two supplementaries.
Q96 Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: This is absolutely fascinating. You have all emphasised the importance of phased development. I was equally taken with your point about diversity of housing provision; I could not agree with you more on that. Many of the persistent themes that we have heard from the people who have contributed to this inquiry concern the use of small and medium enterprises for smaller plots, or smaller areas for development. What role does a master plan have in either ensuring that or facilitating it? It seems absolutely crucial to the flexibility that you are talking about.
Katja Stille: The master plan has to allow, build in and design that richness. Looking at future towns, we need to plan for the leafy suburbs, with bigger gardens and houses. We also need to plan for the compact urban centres that create vibrancy and activity. We really need everything that we love about our existing market towns, for example. At the moment, we are not doing that. We need to acknowledge that people are different and want to live different lifestyles; these new towns have to accommodate that.
The role of the master plan is to create the framework and tie all that together so that you can have national housebuilders doing what they do best, but you can also accommodate SME developers, which mostly build what we call the “missing middle”—the medium-density compact developments. They can come forward on smaller sites. You can include specialist housing, such as housing for the elderly, but it is the master plan framework that ensures that it all comes together into a coherent town.
Anne Ogundiya: It is a really good and important question. In my view, it sits at the heart of what successful master planning is, in terms of long-term planning. Currently, if you get planning permission for an outline scheme, you have two to three years to submit details for reserved matters in order to give all the details. That takes time. What we are talking about is a master plan that may have a 25 or 30-year vision but must have clear spatial principles.
For new towns, what needs to happen is one of two things. You have to give certainty that you are going to unlock delivery, and you have to be flexible to adapt over time. My suggestion would be having a phased permission where you are clear about what is coming forward in the early phases, so it is a hybrid permission; we did that at the LLDC. So, you have a hybrid permission that sets out clearly what is coming forward and gives certainty to all those people who are concerned and have a vested interest in the land, including communities and residents.
Then, in those later phases—with the meanwhile uses that you are talking about—those can be embedded into the plan. Those are the areas where you can think about flexibility, but it is really important to give clarity of purpose right at the beginning of that approval process by saying, “This is what you are going to get. Yes, you have parameter plans that will show where all the transport nodes are going and set building heights, land uses and all of that, but you have to have some fixes right at the beginning”. The fixes may be on the affordable housing quantum or on where the infrastructure is going.
There is the point about making sure that that house typology is refreshed and is, as Katja said, not all one type but special. You have a variety of architects and designers working on that, but that happens over time. The point I want to make is that there needs to be some clarity right at the beginning of the process as to what exactly is going to be delivered.
Kathryn Firth: My colleagues here have made particularly good points. I totally agree that it is absolutely critical to lay down principles. It is interesting that, at the Olympic Park, there was a moment when, as some of you will remember, all of the southern area had been slated to be housing—we had the arrival of Olympicopolis—but then it was going to be culture and education. What was interesting was that we had laid down spatial principles as well as other principles to do with the approach to sustainability, and so on, but those key routes are still to this day framed by buildings. The fact that people are doing science experiments behind them or making new fashion items is almost secondary. The public realm is framed in the same way, which is really important.
Also, I go back to something that Katja said on housing; it is demonstrated by a project that I worked on in Lewes called the Phoenix, where nine different architectural practices were involved. I was part of the core master planning team. Right from the beginning, there was—we get back to people again—engagement with different groups to see whether there is an appetite for co-living, co-sharing and community land trusts, so that there are alternative tenures to what Katja rather disparagingly presented earlier on in terms of so much of what we have seen built in the past here: everybody gets the same cookie cutter house and there is no element of choice. It is about that early engagement.
What is always heartening to me is that there is an appetite for that diversity. I do not think that there always is on the part of the developers, but they are also cottoning on to this as well.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: I hope so.
Kathryn Firth: Yes—fingers crossed.
Q97 Viscount Hanworth: We understand that new towns and expanded settlements will take a long time to mature. They require a master plan for the provision of infrastructure, which will need to take account of the evolving needs of the developing communities. How is it possible to cater to these needs in a way that avoids major deficiencies and dysfunctions? To illustrate what I have in mind, I observed that, in one development, there was a complete absence of retail provision until the settlement had expanded sufficiently to attract a single megastore. How can such hazards be avoided? Who wants to start? Anne looks engaged.
Anne Ogundiya: That is a really good question. It speaks to my point about having a hybrid outline consent, so that you have details in there and you also have the outline. You are absolutely right that, in trying to create a space, you cannot wait until the 25th year before everything is delivered if it is a 25-year master plan.
What we at the LLDC have done is create neighbourhoods. Each neighbourhood is phased, if you like. As I said earlier, you fix the essentials: you fix the density, the open space ratios, the affordable housing and the social infrastructure. That is why you also need a new town body—a body that has, frankly, the finance and wherewithal to put in all of that social infrastructure at an early stage. A private developer will baulk at the idea of having to put in the supermarket, the community facilities and all those other things, such as schools and so on, without ensuring that they have all the residents or the take-up for that space.
So, we need to fix the essentials. That is why it is important that you have the new town. You require detailed planning for, say, a quarter of the site. You know exactly what is coming forward. Those phases are able to wash their own face in making sure that they are delivering everything that is required to make that place and that phased bit of the development.
It is also important, because it is a long process, to build in review periods—perhaps every five years—so that you can test to see what is happening on the ground. Do we need to do more things? Do we need to bring in different kinds of infrastructure? All of those things can help. Some of the criticism that planners get—I am a planner; I know that this is for another committee—is that the process can take a long time, but, if you have in the planning permission legal adaptation clauses that allow you to do a review without triggering a judicial review or opening up an environmental impact assessment piece of work, that can also help. You are able to look and say, “Right, do we need more housing? Is the housing that we have delivered appropriate? What else do we need to support that community or that development?”
Viscount Hanworth: You seem to be suggesting the idea of self-sufficient microcosms, which you call neighbourhoods. It is extremely difficult in modern circumstances to develop such because of the requirements of big corporate retail, which wants mega centres and whatever. Katja, can you describe an appropriate schedule for providing the necessary infrastructure for a new settlement? How should it evolve through time?
Katja Stille: Most new developments really struggle with providing services. Although there might be a planning consent in place that says, “You have to deliver that shop or that surgery by X houses”, we can see from examples around the country that those mostly Section 106 mechanisms are not strong enough to deliver. We need to rethink how we are delivering those essential infrastructure elements.
It is about partnership building. Shops will not be viable in the first years. GP surgeries and health services are incredibly hard to bring forward. We often say, “Well, we can build a health centre, but we cannot put a GP in it. We can build a road, but we cannot put a bus on it”. It is those elements that are really tricky—the delivery of the actual services.
We had a session at Otterpool Park where we brought together 40 people from the NHS and communities—everybody—and asked, “Okay, how can we solve this? Let’s put a portakabin somewhere in the short term, and a GP can come once a week”. However, making these things actually happen takes a lot of time and conversations. It is about partnership. We have to build to the strengths of people and organisations. We often rely on housebuilders to create the centres. What they do best is building houses. They may not be the best partners to create a place and a vibrant town centre, so we need wider partnerships really drawing out the expertise.
Where we have seen the successful creation of places, with vibrancy and activity, is in the regeneration projects. That is where it happens more easily than in new towns. As to the timeframe, we need to start from day one, almost, but with meanwhile uses. We cannot expect the final product, because that is not commercially viable, but we need meanwhile uses where people can access the shops and services that they need.
Q98 Lord Mawson: Is it not true that the NHS property piece is just bust? It is in a terrible mess, is it not? To try to build anything with the NHS is a nightmare. Is that true? Is it your experience?
Katja Stille: It is really challenging. There are so many different people involved and different processes. There was one scenario where we had a local GP saying, “I will come to the new settlement and work from a temporary room”, but there were procurement reasons why they were not allowed to do that, which are way beyond me. Even if people are willing, it does not always happen.
Q99 Baroness Janke: Clearly, there is a whole issue of confidence, for example with the local population. You are talking about having lots of working groups and so on, but then the pressure is coming from the investors to make progress and to be able to have confidence that the thing is actually going to go ahead and they are going to realise the value on their money. Are you saying that you need more powers or a better degree of working across government departments? Are you saying local power is one thing but you need more power from central government to ensure that these things happen sufficiently at local level to give that confidence while not detracting from the confidence of the investors? What does it take to achieve this narrow line that you walk with new towns?
Katja Stille: Governmental departments need to talk to each other. The NHS needs to talk to Planning. That needs to be interlinked more. The long-term plans of different departments and Ministries probably need to align more. We have seen good examples where development corporations, such as Ebbsfleet, have brought a lot of the social infrastructure and schools forward, so that the developers can get on with building the houses and the community can be established. They brought forward and motivated proactively the facilities.
Baroness Janke: Could you tell us some examples of where you feel that this has worked well, and where there has been good practice?
Katja Stille: Ebbsfleet Development Corporation has done a brilliant job in delivering a lot of the facilities.
Baroness Janke: Are there other examples that you could perhaps write to us about?
Katja Stille: Yes, I can come back on that.
Anne Ogundiya: I can also include a lot of examples from the London Legacy Development Corporation’s perspective.
Kathryn Firth: I think Katja has covered this well, but it is about taking the right bite, as phase 1 is so critical. My concern is that, when people hear, “Okay, there is going to be this new town of 10,000 homes”, we all have to understand that is not 10,000 homes overnight. Places take time. They are organic. Here we are 12 years on from the very accelerated programme at the Olympic Park, and it is still being built out, so it is really about understanding those neighbourhoods or bitesize pieces, in terms of both garnering investment and giving communities a reality check on what is possible.
As I said earlier, as much as we can incentivise or have partnerships to ensure that that kind of community infrastructure is in place, if we look back at the history of new towns, the more successful new towns had economic drivers. Whether in this day and age it is going to be life sciences or med tech of some sort, that is what is so important and that is certainly what we are finding even when there is rail.
We are looking at new communities along the East West Rail line, where Cambridge is sucking up a lot of the goodies. What are the drivers for these other towns? Some of them already exist in part. That is really important but I would argue it is very much worth the fight[2], because the behaviour that you embed from day one, in terms of how people move around their neighbourhood as opposed to getting in their car and driving to the superstore in the next town over, is going to live on. So, the more we can—I am saying something that is deadly obvious, but it is not evidenced in all of the new developments we see today—embed that behaviour that I can walk or cycle, even if it is just to the one corner store and the pub to start with, that is super important.
Baroness Janke: It needs to be linked to economic drivers in your view, so the selection of sites ought to have a strong economic driver backstory.
Kathryn Firth: I believe so. Otherwise, we are creating dormitories, and I think we have learned our lessons on that. We do not want to be building more motorway infrastructure. That is not the best use of investment.
Anne Ogundiya: To respond to your point on whether we need more regulations, I would say no, contrary to Katja’s view. I think the levers are already there. There is a plethora of good stuff out there. We just need to be able to co-ordinate that better and a lot of it, frankly, is around communication. It is about conversations that we would have with the NHS, which we know is in a state of flux at the moment, and conversations that we should be having between bodies—not creating more regulation, paperwork and bureaucracy.
Q100 Baroness Janke: Do you also need the long view? If you are thinking about 10,000 houses, are you also thinking of points in the future where you look beyond those targets for flexibility of development? Would that need to be laid out as part of the master plan, as stages you would reach in looking at that flexibility?
Anne Ogundiya: We should be doing more to ensure that we have the flexibility and the fixes very clear. I go back to communities and what their expectation is. That needs to be absolutely clear. I do not think we can underestimate the power of the new towns in terms of delivering a huge amount of infrastructure. Without that infrastructure in the beginning, I think there will be problems. You can put in all your review mechanisms, but you need to be able to show what you are delivering from the outset.
Q101 Baroness Andrews: Just to drive down into the argument on economic drivers, clearly some new towns will have fairly explicit economic drivers because there will be an explicit need and, as in Oxford and Cambridge, there will be skills and issues around affordable housing as well, so that becomes fairly clear as a statement in your master plan. But how do you create a narrative for a new town that does not have an explicit economic driver? Is it easier to do it with an extension rather than a new town and, if so, are there some universal principles that apply?
In relation to that, the Government have been clear about the twin purposes of new towns. They must be about economic growth and they must provide affordable housing, but we have been told by other witnesses that 10,000 homes is not viable, and they need to be bigger. Would you agree with that? Admittedly, you have just answered the question about growth and flexibility.
Katja, you said very early on that you had not cracked the business of building in the notion of the town centre. Town centres are changing and are no longer those explicit drivers of economic growth, because they are not related to retail in the way that they were. So how does that fit into the whole narrative of economic growth?
Katja Stille: We are working on Northstowe, which I think you have heard about. In phase 1, the services were not delivered and then the confidence in the whole town dipped. The town centre in that new town is designed to have and is of a scale that has everything—probably more than what our existing market towns have. There is space for it, but in terms of delivery, because it is not commercially viable and because, for example, in town centres we want mixed-use buildings with flats above and commercial on the ground floor, we cannot really build these buildings if we do not know what to put on the bottom. Having buildings with empty bottoms undermines confidence even more, so the phasing is very tricky.
There needs to be an acknowledgement that almost all of the commercial area that you create in the first years is not going to contribute to your viability. Let us think about affordable rents and giving those spaces away in the short term to create vibrancy in the whole town and ensure the delivery of the whole town. Too often we are still trying to attach a commercial value to those areas in the early years, and that holds back the delivery in a strange sort of way. That is the really tricky part.
In the old generation of new towns, there was a high percentage of affordable homes and people moved there en masse. At the moment we build out one house at a time. It takes much longer to create that population and that vibrancy. If we have existing drivers—businesses or universities that can move into those new towns—you create an immediate population. So those elements need to be explored, and they are the mechanisms to unlocking a quicker delivery of these town centres.
Anne Ogundiya: It is about taking a long-term interest. You seek your returns over a longer period. That is the way you get better place-making. It is not just about selling off sites quickly; you have to invest in the place and help to solidify the communities and that sense of place in order to create robustness in the places that you are creating. It is sort of harking back to that great estates model. That is, to my mind, the way forward.
Kathryn Firth: You mentioned extensions to existing towns. I do think that is an area that should get most of the attention, dare I say, because that gives you a springboard economically. Indeed, a lot of those existing towns may not have the diversity of housing type or tenure that people are now looking for; perhaps the children of those people who are living there will not want the same four-bedroom house and garden, certainly not from the outset, so we should provide them with choice. We have a funny thing going for us in that, while I support London being considered as a place for new towns—using a very broad definition, in the sense that you might see the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park as a kind of town extension—the fact that London has become so incredibly expensive is working in favour of new towns. They become alternatives, so we need to give people choice.
We did a big study that looked at people living in outer areas post pandemic. We heard from a lot of people that they want an urban lifestyle but not within the metropolis of London, New York or wherever—it was an international study. That is quite interesting and bodes well, in fact, for making these places based around active travel. If you have that connectivity and make sure that you have integrated the existing town so that you do not get a them-and-us situation, the outcome could be positive.
Q102 Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: Thank you, this is really interesting. Could you explore the tensions in the Government wanting the new towns to be exemplars? They will be tempted to make the national design guide statutory guidance. Kathryn talked about diversity and Lord Mawson mentioned memory and place. All of that flows against having a set design guide that lays everything down. How will you navigate around those tensions? Is statutory national design guidance desirable or not? Does it make your lives easier or harder?
Kathryn Firth: It is a good starting point. In my experience with the national model design codes—and I know they are being revised as we speak—they are quite high level. They are, in a sense, best practice. They are a starting point. They are not the end point because they do not give you that specificity of place. That needs to come through that master planning process through another level, whether it is codified or in guidance, that then is watched over time and adhered to as development comes forward.
However, it is a good starting point. It gets back to the issue around the resourcing and planning departments. Again, funnily, it will always be easier than starting from scratch and so it makes sense to have guidelines, but then you also do not need to see them as a straitjacket.
We had design codes and guidelines for the neighbourhoods at the Olympic Park, and master planning and developer teams were free to come forward and suggest variations to that because, as I said before, cities are dynamic. Something may have changed. Something may be happening next door that was not happening when it was put in place. They are codes but they need to be nimble at the same time.
To use the example of the Phoenix again, we came up with—I hesitate to say the phrase because it has become overused and sounds a bit clichéd—'golden threads’. They sat next to the design codes and drew out what was specific and special about the place and what we were looking for within each of those neighbourhood blocks as they got developed. Those things could then play off each other.
Anne Ogundiya: It is the word “mandatory”, and then “guidance”. The goal should be about consistent, maybe national, expectations, considering and understanding the local vernacular in terms of your delivery. As I said, a plethora of stuff is out there anyway, but maybe—I say this because of the experience of where it has worked well—design review panels should be mandatory. They add immense value to the master plan process. You would have a panel of experts in the built environment—architects, sustainability experts, planners, you name it.
Inclusive design panels have worked well. At the LLDC we had the built environment access panel, made up of experts who had a disability and were able to contribute to our understanding of what access and inclusion generally was required. There was also the community review panel, with local residents coming together and critiquing and holding the master plan process to account and saying exactly what they wanted. Maybe those things should be mandatory. The inclusive design panels also need to focus on gender equity. That perhaps should be mandatory. Maybe we should have a requirement for design codes, but do not specify what goes into that code. It should be up to the local area to design that.
Then it is about knowing upfront what your stewardship will look like. That might be helpful. Who will own those spaces? Who will they be handed over to and what will be the meanwhile uses that we talked about earlier? Maybe it would be helpful to have the management of those plans set out. Of course, thinking further along the line, maybe have some benchmarks for green infrastructure, walking routes and affordable housing.
I am saying this as a definite maybe—yes, have some guidance, but I am also not so sure. As I said right at the off, the LLDC did things because it wanted to and because it had design and place-making right at its gut, so it did a lot of innovative stuff. You need to be able to allow these bodies to do that creative work, but this may be a way of using what was done well as a baseline and not putting too much layering and prescription on it.
Kathryn Firth: We have design codes.
Anne Ogundiya: Yes, design codes are good, in their place.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: Before you come in, Katja, can I add one last question, which you may choose to answer as well? Anne’s mention of the vernacular made me slightly fear that we will get dozens of little or biggish Poundburys all over the place and nothing imaginative or innovative.
Katja Stille: On a practical note, we do need mandatory guidance, even if there is a slight conflict between “mandatory” and “guidance”, because it could cut out a lot of time. At the moment, every local highways authority has its own standards. Half of the time is spent on negotiating with them what a normal residential street should look like and what is adopted or not. Those elements, practically, could be in a national guide. It is the same for what a good home looks like. I am not saying it needs to have a certain number of rooms, but light, air, energy efficiency and all those elements—and also a requirement for a variety of density to motivate and encourage these places to become rich future towns.
A lot of those elements could be set at a national level, because then designers and communities can together focus on making that place distinct, rather than on what the residential street looks like, because it probably will not look that different from another place in another country. It is about those elements.
We need to be mindful when setting guidance, particularly if it gets specific, that we are not looking backwards. At the moment, a lot of our guidance and evidence is always looking backwards. That is baking in the fact that we are standing still and everything that we are building is 10 years out of date. We need to build in that flexibility and be future facing. Sustainability standards are likely to change. How people live might change. How people use their cars might change. We need to be careful that we do not bake in unsustainable lifestyles or backwards-looking architecture and that we leave that space for innovation and development.
Anne Ogundiya: To sum up, we are saying that guidance should focus on the process but, certainly in terms of design, not on the architecture.
Kathryn Firth: To that point, in a funny way, even on the actual architectural style at that building scale there are some key principles that one can embed in codes about frontages—perhaps on the layer of the more detailed materiality that will relate to that location, because there might be different materials.
We are in an interesting time, because we are now starting to work with a lot of materials that were not part of traditional housebuilding. We cannot just do a pastiche, I hope, but we have to be more inventive because we are working with different materials as we become more sustainable in our construction techniques.
We produced a little document, because the mayor when I was there kept saying: “Could we just build more Georgian and Victorian homes?” We wanted the title to be “We are not Georgians”, as it was demonstrating how we do not live in the same way. It is more important for us to provide bicycle storage in a home than car parking. It is more important to provide a certain amount and type of outdoor private and semi-private space. It is more important to provide flexible space where people might work. I am sure that Georgian homes have in many cases accommodated all these things now, but this is a different era and we need to recognise that.
Q103 Lord Bailey of Paddington: I am interested in two pieces. The first is that this design guide, when it links to our history, can be ridiculous. Where the new City Hall is, there are these lovely new developments but massive old cranes outside, because it used to be a dock. Of course, at some point someone will have to maintain the safety of those cranes. Who will pay for that? It is ridiculous, but I bet it is part of the design guideline to acknowledge the past, as it were.
To what extent can the master planning process capture some of the financial realities of that area going forward? You talked about the difficulty of getting NHS doctors in at the right time and so on. To what extent can it capture those things so that they can be dealt with in the plan? Can it ask for subsidy upfront so that at least some of these things will happen?
Also, to what extent can design guides set a series of tasks nationally so that locally people can respond in their own way? You might have access to different materials in Wales, where slate is cheaper, than in Cornwall or wherever. How can it set a set of goals that you are then allowed to respond to locally? Is that possible?
Katja Stille: I will start with the second question on the national design guide. The existing one sets the principles. A lot of the design codes that are being written at the moment are design guides for local authorities, setting the principle. Then, for example, the integration with the landscape or the topography is done locally. Then the designers have to respond to it and almost demonstrate, justify and illustrate how they have achieved the master plan. That is one way of the guides and codes doing a lot of the heavy lifting. It is almost setting out your parameters and principles of what that new place needs to be.
That is also an appropriate way to tie in public transport, facilities, environment, flooding and all those other elements. I agree with Kathryn that almost all those elements are more important than the actual detailed design. While we can set principles about the quality of the design, we cannot and should not dictate the style of it.
The commercial and economic elements are not my area of expertise, but the master plan has a role to play in providing the facilities and elements that can support the future economic vibrancy of that town. The old new towns often have community land trusts that look after the management of the open spaces and of the commercial premises. They get an income and do not just look after open spaces. That balance is where a master plan helps, if it is set out in the right way and is phased in the right way.
We have seen discussions about how ground-mounted photovoltaics might help provide the future community with income, but it is a big cost at the outset. That is the balancing act that master plans and the business cases that come with master plans are playing with and trying to balance.
Kathryn Firth: It is interesting balancing aspiration with current reality because we know only what is going on now. If either of you has found a market adviser who is willing to say anything that might be further than five years out, please send them my way. They tend to be incredibly conservative because they do not want someone coming back and saying, “You said this would happen and it has not happened.”
We find in many cases—we are working in Cambourne right now—an aspiration to have strong economic underpinnings, but we do not know, because we do not have a crystal ball, exactly who might seize the moment and come to Cambourne. Will it be a spillover from Cambridge or another enterprise from elsewhere? As master planners, we can provide the space for that to happen and identify where that would be best situated, and balance that with not having it look like a derelict piece of land in the meantime. That might mean having temporary or recreational activities there in the short term, knowing that that could change in the long term.
It is again this issue about being nimble, as we have talked about, having codes and guidelines in place as a checklist but being able to be nimble and push back on them. Then we get back to ensuring that the planning authority has the resource to do that. Anne mentioned a design/quality review panel that can help ensure that those principles are adhered to.
Q104 Lord Bailey of Paddington: Before you answer, Anne, to go slightly beyond that because of your work on the Olympic Park, to what extent can a master plan and whoever you come up with to manage the new town be challenged with attracting business and people to that town? If you look at America, it looks like they will walk into the middle of somewhere and say: “The local authority can build houses there but, by the way, we will go and look for a business or whatever to set up here.” Can that be captured in the master plan, by whoever manages the area of the plan?
Anne Ogundiya: Adding to what Katya and Kathryn have said, we do not have a crystal ball, though developers and investors would like us to have one. The main point is just to make sure that the master plan gives enough certainty to unlock that investment, but it has to be responsive to shifts in the market, shifts in policy and shifts in people and construction methods, as Kathryn has mentioned.
Looking back at the London Legacy Development Corporation and the Olympic Park, two things come to mind. The meanwhile uses at Hackney Bridge were hugely successful. It is private, albeit with the LLDC’s investment in the infrastructure and so on. That has worked and is working successfully. It is probably quite long term and one hopes that some of those businesses then go into the new neighbourhoods, as they are up and coming. They are independent retail uses and food and beverage uses that the community wants, so that is good.
A good thing that came out of a development corporation and probably could come out of the new towns is East Bank. It would not have happened without that investment of a public body. It was a huge risk—we talked about risk earlier—but it was a risk that the public body at the LLDC was prepared to take. It has created a great new part of London. You will have people and visitors and cultural, educational and media uses, which you would not have had without that investment. It has brought a different kind of people there.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: My experience of East Bank and that whole area is that they deliberately sought companies and universities. They made the choice to go and pursue people—they did not just put their master plan out and hope.
Anne Ogundiya: That is exactly right, which is my whole point about leadership and vision. You have to have the right people in place to get something that is special. It was about having conversations and encouraging people to come to an area that they probably had not thought about. It was a lot of hard work and a lot of stuff that does not come from documents and books. It is that human contact. It is negotiation. That worked and it has created a great place.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: I am a Londoner, but where is East Bank?
Anne Ogundiya: In Stratford, within the Olympic Park.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: The London College of Fashion is there and all those people.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: That is called East Bank?
Anne Ogundiya: Yes. East Bank contains UCL, Sadler’s Wells, the BBC, the V&A and UAL.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: I had no idea it was called East Bank. Some estate agent called it that?
Lord Bailey of Paddington: Yes, that is right; it will be called a village soon.
Lord Mawson: As someone who helped deliver the £400 million UCL investment there, we were clear about it in 2006 and 2007 when three of us thought about that with Mark Bostock. To be fair, Boris Johnson then got behind that idea and called it Olympicopolis. Some of us said, “We do not mind what you call it, but we need to do it”.
It was not East Bank. Sadiq Khan has never fully understood what this was. This was absolutely an innovation district, which was about bringing culture, arts, a fantastic entrepreneurial business in the London College of Fashion and University College London, which was into making and all of that, together in the middle of east London. It was clear that the board owned that vision and was into the detail of it. It was not a policy thing. It was detail on the board.
Anne Ogundiya: That is exactly my point about leadership and vision. It has to permeate all areas of the organisation.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: Can that be encoded in the master plan?
Kathryn Firth: The short answer is no. The master plan can only go so far. As I said before, the original legacy community scheme was all housing where East Bank, which was called Stratford Waterfront—which made more sense—was originally. Then there was, as Lord Mawson was talking about, this great push to try to make it into a culture and education space. That is why, as I was saying before, master plans also need to be nimble.
If we look to the north of the park where we had Here East, we knew we were going to be saddled with this press and media centre that is 300 metres long, which we had to do something with. Again, it was going to market. It was appearing on the master plan in the early days with no sense exactly of what it was going to be. If you were in some other part of the country, it could be an old industrial building, but somehow it is their part of the site. Then the leadership went to market and said, “Come forward with ideas”. Many came forward that were not what then became Here East, and even then it was a risk.
It has worked out fabulously, if you have been there, but no one knew it would for sure. There were things such as whether we would keep the car park to the north. Many of us master planners said, “No, get rid of it. We do not want a car park”. It became part of the deal for Here East; it is there today and looks more beautiful than it once did.
Q105 Lord Cameron of Dillington: This has been a good session so far. How do you ensure the master plan is seen through in its integrity over the decade or so that it will be implemented? There has to be some flexibility. Kathryn mentioned that the master plan has to be dynamic. Bearing in mind that there are bound to be economic black holes during this whole process and that the developer, like King Midas, is probably able to convert wood into gold—woodland and green spaces into executive homes or a shopping mall at any moment—who oversees the process to ensure that that does not happen, or does not happen in a bad way, and that economic viability is balanced with the integrity of the master plan? Should it be local government? Should it be central government? Should it be the development corporation? How can this be done?
Kathryn Firth: Anne has touched upon this. You need some sort of development corporation or oversight group, which I would argue should be at least regionally based because it has to understand the specifics of that place. I would not necessarily mandate a national body to oversee all the new towns that is expected to be able to focus on these specific new towns and to give each of them a level of attention to ensure that they adhere to what we have called a master plan but is essentially a framework and a set of principles. Yes, it may get down to the level of guidance and codification but, as we have all said, those need to be flexible. As we know, the new towns will be developed in a phased plot-by-plot manner. It will be important to decide where you put that first pebble in the pond that will have the ripple effect.
Anne also raised this idea of a design quality review panel. That is important. Every local authority across London and many of the areas beyond now have design review panels. When we started at the LLDC, that was not the case and we created a specific quality review panel. I would argue that, ideally, it should be more than advisory and should be almost like a statutory consultee that has the power to approve or disapprove what comes forward.
The problem right now is the tension between the need to build more homes and the quality of place. They are in tension and sometimes quality—I have seen it, sadly, up close and personal—of place loses and the building of new homes wins. I feel like we need to be kept to account on what that original framework says and, if something needs pushing back, professionals can then advise, whether it is from a design review panel or something similar, that oversight body.
Anne Ogundiya: Sustained oversight is not just helpful; it is fundamental. The new towns will evolve over 15, 20, 30 years or even longer and, without that clear system of stewardship, that original vision can be lost or can start to unravel.
Lord Cameron of Dillington: Who should do the oversight?
Anne Ogundiya: It should be a development corporation or a statutory delivery body, but it has to have powers that last through the life of the scheme. That is critical. You then have to have the design reviews and phased check-ins. All that has to be embedded within the planning permission or the developer agreements.
It is also important—and we have not talked about it—to have post-occupancy evaluations and bits of work, which are helpful. We did that on Chobham Manor, another part of the Olympic Park. You will get to understand what has worked from residents and what you can do better as you deliver the later phases. There need to be community governance structures in the community; giving residents a voice, especially in the later phases, is really important.
I have probably said this already, but I want to emphasise the importance of hybrid permissions or consents, with, say, 25% of the fixes done upfront. Fix the essentials—the density, the open space, the affordable housing. Do all of that. Get the infrastructure in, which is important, because without it the development will stall. That talks to the economic viability that we have been discussing this morning. Then you need to build in mandatory review period checks every five years or so.
Katja Stille: I do not have much to add, only that you could have an individual identified as the design champion who sits within the organisation and who can work day to day with the technical teams and the architects, because so many decisions are taken daily that can undermine the vision. That design champion can also sit on the board and protect the interests of future residents and communities, because some of those new towns do not have communities. It is about protecting future residents’ quality of life through that.
Anne Ogundiya: That design champion should probably be at a senior level, should sit on the board and should not be fettered or encumbered with the money or the commerciality so that they can then focus primarily on place-making and design.
Q106 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: I have agreed with everything you have been saying about development corporations. As my colleagues know, I worked for a development corporation for a West Midlands new town a very long time ago. It played an absolutely crucial role in the creation of what has become a new city. If it had not been there, the whole thing would have fallen apart and the local authorities would have gone their own way.
However, what happens if it goes wrong? We have heard about what has happened in the new development of Cambourne near Cambridge. Terry Farrell and Partners came forward with an imaginative scheme for new high streets and town squares and so on but, once he left the development, the supermarket decided it wanted to take over the market square and turned it into a car park. What can be done to prevent that happening? Do you need a statutory body of the sort you have been talking about today to stop that happening in the future?
Anne Ogundiya: On the one hand I say more regulation, and then I say no. Frankly, there is enough in the planning toolbox to say that we do not need any more, but you need to strengthen legal agreements and have cascade mechanisms within that legal agreement that will look at various options: “If X happens, then we do we do Y. If Y happens, then we do Z”. It is about having foresight and looking at those various scenarios. I do not know the specifics of the Cambourne estate. I am looking to Kathryn to respond to that.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Kathryn got quite excited when I mentioned it.
Kathryn Firth: Yes, as we speak, we are working on that and trying to fix it. Because of the arrival of East West Rail, which one hopes will act as a strong catalyst, we are proposing new development to the north of the station of the existing Cambourne but, at the same time, with an eye to exactly where we feel like it has gone wrong. In a funny way, the town centre there is an easier fix than the residential, which sadly fits Katja’s earlier description of a lot of what is being built.
To Anne’s point, it is very much about having strong leadership, whether that is a development corporation that then pushes back or some review panel that pushes back. As you said, Terry Farrell was not envisioning what we see today. If there had been enough authority and empowerment for people to push back and say, “No, that is not what we want”, we would not have that today.
Maybe I am too jaded about what is going on in the world right now, but you can make a lot of rules and then they can all be broken. Often it is down to the individuals who are involved in the decision making, which is why this idea of having a design champion on board needs to override someone coming in with deep pockets and saying, “I want to do big box retail and that is the end of it.”
Q107 The Chair: I have one quick question for a quickfire round. We talk about 10,000 homes. We talk about vision. We talk about innovation. Are you able to get a visionary place with 10,000 homes on one location?
Anne Ogundiya: In the LLDC area, we have delivered over 14,500 homes from 2012 to date and another 15,000 homes are in the pipeline and have planning permission. I will point to that development corporation.
Kathryn Firth: I think your question is, when there were only 10,000 homes, was it a place? I would argue yes, but it is because of the amazing landscape and public realm that gives it that sense of place, which is again a slight cliché but makes sense here. That mix of uses has been coming. I am not talking about Westfield—do not get me started on Westfield—but the other community uses and commercial uses, such as the Here East, cultural activities and meanwhile uses that were already happening and gave it that sense even when it was 8,000 or 10,000 homes.
Katja Stille: It is possible. Even if it is 10,000, we need to be future facing. It comes back to the commercial advice that we often get. With 10,000 homes, you get a corner shop, three shops and a food store. That is not enough for a town to grow in the future. We need proper future-facing economic advice that learns from the existing places rather than what the commercial market would provide right now.
The Chair: Fantastic. Thank you very much. You will be pleased to know that that is the end of the session. You have mentioned a few examples and you have heard some of the bits that we are interested in. If you could please follow up with any specific evidence, it would be appreciated very much. Thank you for coming in today. That is the end of the meeting.
