James Scott

James is the Group Director of Strategy and Planning at leading Master Developer, Urban & Civic.  

The company was specifically created 15 years ago to disrupt the established approach to the promotion and delivery of large scale residential led Strategic Sites. 

James qualified as a barrister before advising the Government on planning issues and cross-qualifying as a solicitor.  

Prior to being one of the founder members of Urban&Civic, James was part of the senior executive team of Lend Lease Europe with responsibility for town planning and risk management.  

Within Urban&Civic, James heads up strategy, planning and communications.  

Having previously served as a non-executive director of East Thames Housing association and sat on the Development Committee of L&Q, James is currently a senior advisor to Dorrington PLC and a non-executive of Natural England. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Today, you can take people from different local authorities to any number of our sites, and there would be a unifying sense of quality, cohesion, the delivery of infrastructure, the delivery of community, place, and space that actually they know from the doorsteps and their post bags is the major complaint of places that have not been brought forward in this manner. And so you can build that relationship on a seeing is believing basis.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Hi, I'm Susan Freeman. Welcome back to our Property She podcast series brought to you by Mish Condoraya in association with the London Real Estate Forum, where I get to interview some of the key influencers in the world of real estate and the built environment. Today I'm delighted to welcome James Scott. James is the Group Director of Strategy and Planning at leading master developer Urban and Civic. The company was created 15 years ago to disrupt the established approach to the promotion and delivery of large-scale residential-led strategic sites. James qualified as a barrister before cross-qualifying as a solicitor. Prior to being one of the founder members of Urban and Civic, James was part of the senior executive team of Lendlees Europe with responsibility for town planning and risk management. Within Urban and Civic, James heads up Strategy, Planning and Communications. Having previously served as a non-exec director of East Thames Housing Association and sat on the Development Committee of LQ, James is currently a senior advisor to Dorrington PLC and a non-exec of Natural England. So now I'm very much looking forward to talking to James about how he came to co-found Urban and Civic alongside Nigel Hugel and Robin Butler, and what being a master developer involves. James, good morning and welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Good morning, Susan. Thank you very much for having me. This is a podcast I have listened to for a while now, so it's an absolute pleasure to be joining you.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

That's fantastic. So, in the usual way, before we we talk about urban and civic, I have a few questions about your career path. So very few of my podcast guests actually started out in the law. And uh you were a barrister, then qualified as a solicitor. I just wondered whether you feel that the legal training is an advantage or whether you sometimes feel that um you get too involved in the detail. Because I certainly found that when I did an MBA, I realized that all my years of looking for the downside did not necessarily help me when dealing with entrepreneurial matters.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Do you know what? I think that's a really good way of putting it. And and there's no doubt that when you train as a lawyer, you are spending all of your time looking at risk and trying to work through the worst case possible scenarios and then defend your clients who you often perceived as slightly sort of gung-ho in the way in which they just want to get the deal done and they regard the lawyers as being somewhat sort of fuddy-duddy and overprotective. And how do you make the jump from one to the other? Well, I I think firstly I'd have to put my hands up and say I was probably a bit of a reluctant lawyer, if truth be told. Um I mean, I loved my studies of of the law, and I loved actually, you know, when I was at UCL, I taught for a year afterwards, and and and I absolutely loved the discipline and structure that the law brings. But one of the reasons I didn't stay at the bar was that I I was getting a bit frustrated with the idea that I was just going to be called in at the end of a process when something had gone wrong, and you were going to have to try and fix it rather than actually if you look at the law as a framework against which decisions should be taken, but not always touched upon in the legal context. You should look at it as being a sort of a backstop. And actually getting stuck into helping clients when I went through government and then into Decart and worked with people like Stephen Fogle. Um, you remember Stephen? I mean, so you know, uh absolutely cutting edge back then in terms of real estate lawyer and really sort of got involved with the clients and really sought to work out what their actual commercial challenges are. That's where I realized actually this is where you could have a lot of fun. And then I had a couple of really quite maverick clients, like um uh Mallory Clifford at Plackfriars Investments, who was just wonderful. He was just such a character and an amazing projects, um a puddle dock and the mermaid theatre, and being given the opportunity to run a planning application with Will Olsop as the architect on that project and trying to sort of navigate the real flamboyant approach with uh getting a valid planning application in uh to Peter Reese at uh the City of London, the Corporation of London as then was. And I just thought this is really great fun. And and I was looking for an opportunity to make the jump into the commercial world. But as all lawyers know, the longer you're at it, the more difficult it is because you become more and more senior, and you know, the the creature comforts of salary and various other things are are challenging to move across. So you've got to be quite brave or you've got to have the right opportunity. And well, uh fate favoured the uh the brave in that instance, and I was given uh the opportunity to be seconded over to Lendlease. And at that time, uh Nigel Hugo was executive chairman and Robert Butler was managing director of Lendlease Europe. And to say that it was, you know, it was like finding home would be an understatement. It was absolutely joyous to go into that environment whereby they were delivering the Olympics, they came off the back of Chelsfield with all of that entrepreneurial uh gravitas um that that really underpinned the the direction of the business at that time. And we got on like a house on fire. And I remember having the conversation with Robin, which was, you know, Robin, I don't really want to go back to to DECA. And he said, well, come over and join us. And I said, Well, what would you want me to do? And he said, I don't know, but come over and and we'll find out. And I ended up being the head of risk uh at uh Lendleys Europe for uh it was my first sort of big role. And and I do remember saying, I don't know much about risk management. And they put me in a room with some really earnest individuals who were talking about Monte Carlo modeling. And at that point, all of our eyes were glazing over slightly. And and and somebody took me aside and said, Look, you're a lawyer, you know about risk, you understand risk, it's what you're trained to take on board. And so, in a way, it was like having an MBA on the job, because as the head of risk, you could walk into any division of the business, any meeting, and you'd catch up with the heads of the different divisions on a monthly basis. And I soon learned that the more complicated the structure you put in place, the less effective the answers were at actually being able to understand what people worried about. So I ended up taking people for a coffee once a month, sit down and say, What are you worried about? Let's just work it through. And I had my risk matrix, of course, alongside it. But that really meant that it gave me an insight into the way in which the business operated, the problems that can come about, the way that an opportunity can go from opportunity to business plan banked to risk over the course of a year because things sway through. It was wonderful. And that really underpinned the move across before ultimately when Robin and Nigel took the step out and looked for other opportunities. And um I absolutely was on that journey with them in the in the in the forming of UNC that then came out of it and and never looked back.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

Well, it sounds like uh an inspired role for you. And so how many years did you have at Lendlease before Urban and Civic?

SPEAKER_01 8:35

Not many, actually. It was it was a short but sweet time. Uh often think of Lendlease as as an exceptional academy where a lot of really good people pass through it and go on and do some extraordinary things, as you can see from Earl's Court and elsewhere at the moment. But uh I was there for probably just around two years, I think, uh, in total, um, before I uh moved over to UNC.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

So what was the strategic idea behind urban and civic? What did you want to do differently?

SPEAKER_01 9:08

If we go back to the various earliest conversations, I mean Robin and Nigel are, again, wonderful people, wonderful, inspiring people who had a vision and an understanding of the way large-scale strategic sites worked, but predominantly from a London base, it's fair to say, because Chelsefield and then Lendleis were mainly London focused. But they did realise that actually the leverage of dealing with large-scale blocks of land professionally, getting a planning consent, achieving the uplift, but then being able to deploy the infrastructure needed to unlock that residual store of value was something that was not being very well done at a strategic scale outside of London. You know, that it just was not there were not a lot of people in the market doing that. And, you know, Tony Gallagher was there, but actually there were quite big house-building divisions as well. And and they were struggling slightly because within a house builder, the strategic land business had a slower churn than the house building business, which was on return on capital employed. So there was always a bit of an implicit tension in all of that. And we thought there was a better way of doing it. There was a better, more professional way of doing it right and actually creating really great places that we could be collectively proud of, but recognising that these were going to take a long time to deliver. These were going to be 15, 20, 25 year schemes. And not being afraid of that. That was one of the big barriers to entry that actually people looked at it and thought, God, you must be crazy to be taking on something of that scale and uh and duration. But if you don't, then in essence you lose a unifying guiding force for these places. And you can feel it when you walk around one sort of come forward in a far more piecemeal manner. And that was really the underpinning of it. And all credit to the boys that they not only forged that idea off the back of the experience, but they also pulled together a band of people that we'd all worked together in different ways in different um organizations before, and set off at the bottom end of the global financial crisis in 2009-2010 with a private equity-backed startup acquiring eleven hundred acres of Cold War airfield at the age of Cambridgeshire. You know, you had to be pretty brave to do that. And I think the jury was certainly out in those early days as to whether that was going to be a viable model.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

And how did you how did you go about funding it?

SPEAKER_01 11:48

So that was private equity backed in first instance. It was GI partners that put the the money up for the acquisition of Auckland and the operational capital of Urban A Civic. Equally, though, one of the things that Robin spent a long time doing, looking uh he often tells the story that sat at the desk of um now the late Mike Shaw with a stack of particulars on Mike's desk, Mike not being a very happy man at that particular time with a lot of strategic land uh trying to get out the door, and going through them and looking at the different options. And Alcombury had uh a number of advantages on its face. It was it was brownfield, demonstrably brownfield land, but it also had a s quite a significant temporary income, uh temporary use income, which meant that you could acquire it and you could generate revenue from it from day one rather than just sitting on effectively neutral land, unable to uh generate income until such time as you got a consent and started delivering. And so those two key ingredients really underpinned the selection of that site. So combination of private equity and uh and income from the site. And then we traded on that basis until 2014, when we did the reverse takeover of Terrace Hill, which was an aim listed company, and we did uh a listing on the main market and a capital raise at that time. And that's really where Nigel's connections and uh existing relationships within the funding market um came to the fore. Because you had David Camp on a while ago sort of talking about the fact that your reputation is everything, and actually there was a very much a case of there was a real belief in what was being done and the approach that was being undertaken, and we'd got another site under our belt at that particular point at Halton and Rugby, and we were able to raise the money and list in a way that I think actually very few others would have been able to at that particular time. And then that underpinned our journey right the way through to 2021, when we were acquired by the Wellcome Trust to be part of their investment portfolio. So it's been an amazing existence over that 16 years, not just from a development perspective, but actually even from a corporate evolution perspective.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

And just to give our listeners an idea of the scale of urban and civic now, I mean, how many of these strategic sites do you have under your belt now?

SPEAKER_01 14:22

Yeah, so uh so in 16 years, we've gone from our first strategic site at Auckland Brie to we now have 20 strategic sites uh under our belt with uh about 11 in delivery, in active delivery. And they've come into the portfolio in different ways. So individual negotiation, outright acquisition, public procurement uh are a number of the routes, but we've also uh acquired a number through corporate acquisition. So we acquired a bait a business from Eric Grove back in uh 2015 called Catesby Estates. That brought in one of our strategic sites as well as a smaller scale uh land promotion business. And um then we acquired LQ estates from LQ, which is the business that they had acquired from Tony Gallagher, again in um 2024. So um that that has grown the portfolio either through a combination of organic uh acquisition or through corporate acquisition. And it's brought in such a range and diversity of sites as well, which you know significantly Brownfield, but also Greenfield and a number of Green Belt sites as well. So it's a full mix now.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

And are they all predominantly housing, residential?

SPEAKER_01 15:42

Aaron Ross Powell We'd say they're residential led, but they're not insignificant with commercial. So Alcombrie is three million square feet of commercial floor space alongside um six and a half thousand homes. Uh rugby has or Halton has a million square feet of commercial floor space. There is a real mix, but they would all be residential led, yes.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

And obviously with these these larger schemes, they are very long-term. I just wondered how you balance commercial returns with the day-to-day realities of having infrastructure-heavy, you know, really long-duration schemes. I mean, how how do you generate income during that period?

SPEAKER_01 16:23

You have to be built for it. I mean, my point earlier about the fact that house builders are on a different model and therefore find this a difficult thing to be able to do, the heavy lifting and the duration is a really important point. You you know, you you can't put a square peg into a round hole. You you these are different sites with different metrics and different uh requirements. So the way we've set about doing it is being very clear-eyed about that. You know, we call it the hockey stick, and you're gonna be out for five to six years before you are actually in a position where you're gonna be generating revenue. And in that period, you're gonna be out, you're gonna be spending both on the acquisition, in what form that might take, but also then the significant planning risk and then the early infrastructure piece. Now, over the 16 years, we have seen a massive evolution in the funding market for these as well. So if you think back to what was the Homes and Communities Agency back in the day that then became Homes England and is now becoming the National Housing Bank, we've gone from the very early days of 2014 where they started to talk about infrastructure acceleration loans, but it was on such rigid terms that very often it would be the computer says no if you couldn't fill the spreadsheet in in exactly the right way, to an evolution over that time where they've got some very, very intelligent and commercially minded ex-bankers in there, and they are looking at being able to structure terms which enable you to have long-dated loans with repayment out of receipts and a rolled-up coupon, which is exactly the sort of type of borrowing that you need if you are to manage these large-scale schemes in this way. You had Andrew Jones on a while ago, didn't you, where you're saying that the only way in which you go broke is you oversupply or you overborrow. And the that is certainly true, that these strategic site providers have generally got themselves into problems where they've overly commercially leveraged the sites and then they've had to go through an economic cycle and they've just not been able to refinance within those periods. So we've been very cautious about that, and we've used the Homes England financing on a site-by-site basis in order to be able to do that, go further with the front-end heavy lifting. But we've twinned that with a really, really professional focus and cost control approach to the delivery of that infrastructure. And that's a crucial balance. So it's not just about you if anybody could do it if they had the funding. You've really got to focus in on the product and the the pace of infrastructure delivery and the way in which you then balance your your return profile and look at them really from an IRR perspective rather than uh, as I say, uh more of an immediate return perspective. It's just they just require that sort of thinking. And to that end, I think I would make, you know, coming at this as I often do from the planning perspective, the observation that in the planning world, you don't tend to find that local authorities and indeed government understand that fundamental differential of the viability of these sites and the way in which they need to be done by comparison to a 250-unit site. And that's that's really underpinning one of my big campaigns at the moment, which is this idea of achieving a super strategic site designation in planning, which would enable us to hang more of the framework that's required for these sites off a definable definition and avoid cross-contamination or the cross-contamination risk that local authorities fear about.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

So what what do you think needs to change to sort of help get these super strategic sites off the ground?

SPEAKER_01 20:28

So I'm reasonably well known for a number of different statements in the planning world, one of which we've been promulgating for some time now, which is flexibility is better than prophecy. And um it's so much so that I've even got it on the back of my phone case. And I I think that is one of the really big recognitions that these sites are different. They are just not the way in which you do smaller scale infill sites. You've got to have that mindset that things change over time. You know, going back to your interview with David Kemp, you could actually see him saying the same thing with regard to offices and the fact that they have to be flexible. But if you take an office and think of it as flexibility, if you then take a strategic site at a scale of a thousand acres, and the fact that that's going to be coming forward over 30 years, you've really got to have what we call adaptive certainty rather than prophetic certainty. There's a desire, there's a real desire, and I understand it, of a planner to say, let me nail down all the tent pegs of what this place is going to be at the point of the grant of consent. And then lo and behold, you start unpicking those tent pegs pretty quickly because that just doesn't survive the early engagement and the early structuring. Or worse still, you've not had an honest conversation with the planners and said, actually, look, the logic you're deploying doesn't work. If you make me accept that, then I'm going to have to come back in due course and argue it again. Or that a landowner would just simply say, Oh God, you know, I'm going to give up. I'm just going to accept it, knowing that they might come back. But what that will mean is that there's a broken promise and somebody will remember the promise and somebody will feel cheated. So our approach has always been, look, very honest, very open-eyed, very focused on the delivery of these large-scale strategic sites rather than just the planning of them. And built in a range of mechanisms within our planning consent, which really are enshrined under the caption flexibility is better than prophecy. You create parameters and principles at the outline level. You then come forward with phases of the development at different scales, maybe bigger, smaller, depending upon the site that you're dealing with. And that brings forward a detail in design coding and review opportunity, both viability review, but also transport review and things like this that you can adjust and adapt accordingly as you move through within the overall parameters. And then finally the reserve matters applications that you bring forward as a master developer for the green and the grey and the community infrastructure. And then the house builders, our customers, bring forward for the homes. And we found that works really well, but it does take a logic shift. And part of the difficulty and why we're going on about the super strategic site designation is because that will then give a formal recognition of the fact that these sites are different and have to be treated differently, and that this isn't the local planning authority or the planning officer being, if you like, led down the garden path to the advantage of a developer. There's got to be a degree of trust in this. And Mark Flessing was talking about that on your podcast as well, about the fact that actually there's got to be a degree of trust between planners and developers. But particularly so if you're going to be together for 30 years. Well, again, you know, if you are on a site for 30 years, you have to be pretty clear-eyed that you're going to go through both economic and political cycles and that therefore you can't just expect your relationships that you forge on day one to survive all the way through that period of time. You've got to keep building and engaging and discussing with the politicians that are in front of you at the time. And you have to be very straight about this. You know, you have to engage with the politicians that are in front of you at the time, and you are responsible for the curation and the guiding of the site throughout its lifespan as a master developer. So, you know, we have seen councils, in fact, across our portfolio of sites whereby they would have started predominantly in local authorities that were predominantly blue, and now we're seeing a far greater diversity. And at the moment, on the basis of recent local elections, you are seeing an increased preponderance of no overall control, so no single party with a with a majority, and you're therefore seeing coalitions emerge. And it's all about continuing to engage with those local authorities and those members and build the relationships with them, show them as they come into their posts the sites, explain why that we're doing things the way we're doing things, identify the quality, identify the fact that people actually enjoy living on these sites. And our experience is that transfer of power means you've got to build new relationships. There might be a little bit of a delay. It doesn't mean that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. And, you know, again, we the the big outcome of these local elections has been the rise of reform councillors. And we've got reform counselors and reform councils that we're now engaging with. Equally, we've seen some local authorities where they were Lib Dem-led, particularly where those Lib Dem majorities have strengthened. So it's not a universal picture by any means. And you've just got to engage with what's in front of you and recognise that it will change over time. And certainly not play the odds. You know, there is no point in doing that.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

And you mentioned trust, and you know, one of the things I hear often from developers is the difficulty of building trust with the local authorities. And so I suppose if you have new inexperienced counsellors coming in, they may be coming in with thoughts that they can't trust developers, and you've got to, you know, you've got to build that relationship all over again.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

Yeah, you do. I go back to our earliest days at UNC when we were really trading on our previous reputations in the market of Chelsfield, Lend Lease, and what had been done outside of Urban and Civic. And the two big areas that we were working in at that particular time was Huntingtonshire with Auckham Brie and Rugby with Halton. At that time, we did not have anything to show for what we were seeking to achieve. There was a degree of, you know, we're gonna trust us, we're gonna do this right, but you've got to trust us. And I take my hat off to the both the planning officers and the members in those councils at that particular time. You know, there are people there that I'd identify as my planning heroes in local authority planning departments, people like Anna Rose, who headed up the department at uh rugby, Steve Ingram uh and and Malcolm Sharp at Huntington, and they were prepared to give us a go. They were prepared to say, all right, this is a bit different. These guys a bit maverick, but let's give this a go. Today, you can take people from different local authorities to any number of our sites, and there would be a unifying sense of quality, cohesion, the delivery of infrastructure, the delivery of community, place and space that actually they know from the doorsteps and their post bags is the major complaint of places that have not been brought forward in this manner. And so you can build that relationship on a seeing is believing basis. Now that's the advantage we're in today. It's also the hurdle that people coming into this sector would have if they were starting afresh. And a reputation hard fought is easily lost. And we, you know, as we grow and as more people come into the business, Robin, Nigel, and myself all sit down and do an induction with every new joiner in the business. And it's a point we make. It really is that actually this is something we are very proud of and continue to fight for on a day-to-day basis.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

The government has set a target of 1.5 million new homes in this parliament. And you know, we're now hearing construction costs have doubled. You know, house prices certainly in London remain flat. I mean, how is that affecting what you're doing at Urban and Civit?

SPEAKER_01 30:05

Yeah, it it is definitely another period of volatility that we are having to navigate. Completions are materially below the $300,000 a year target. Um, average house prices have dropped from their peak of about $395,000 to currently around $380,000. Um, you're seeing um the six major publicly listed uh house builders, their market capitalization is around 50% of what the 2020 peak was. So there are undoubted headwinds, and you know, you can see that in guilt rates as well, and the prospect that we haven't seen any interest rate reductions, and even you know, uh most recently that you're beginning to see the uh Fed futures showing that you've got a one in three chance of interest rates going up in the US by the end of the year. So we don't gainsay this at all, but again, it goes to the fact that this is an economic cycle, and these sites are have to be built to be able to handle that economic cycle. And there are periods last year, for example, where the house builders were very active and they were buying land parcels from us at record rates. Um this year it does feel quieter. But at the same time, you're seeing the evolution of the single-family home build-to-rent model on these large-scale sites outside of the multifamily, more dense London flatted model that we would have known uh so well. So, you know, there I can say that you know, from the trials that we're doing, and we've got a bit UNC pipeline of um three sites that are coming forward for build-to-rent uh at the moment, but we've got a lot of land and we've got a lot of opportunity to deliver more build-to-rent into those markets. New homes rent five times faster than they sell. And there will be this cycle. If you go back to the conversation again you had with Mark, which was a really, a really fascinating conversation from a man that had sort of structured and designed a product to meet a demand. What he said, which struck with me, was that in essence you've got market housing and you've got social housing, and in between you've got affordable housing. But the definition of affordable housing should be very broad, and it should include things like market rent, things like pocket living that they're doing, things like affordable rent, and all of that will then create a set of tiers that people can deploy themselves to depending upon their need and their resources and their situation at a relevant time. And that's what we're seeing with these sites. They've got an enormous opportunity to create a broad tenure mix of homes. And we have to help curate that through the different cycles that we are facing. And sometimes you'll be dialing up market sales, sometimes you'll be dialing up uh rental. And that's that's the opportunity that these sites present. They're not very dense metropolitan sites where the economics have basically you've you've jumped in on the basis of an economic stack, the variance of which destroys the investment hypothesis. Here, you can dial up, dial down as you need to to move through the cycle. And absorption rates for us are really important. Um they're you know, they're probably uh more important than the exact pounds per square foot of the uh of the selling price because you're wanting to move through and keep the delivery of the spite going. When a site stalls, that's not a good feel. And you can see those, you know, where the the hoardings have gone up around a particular parcel and nothing's happening on it, but people are living either side. That that doesn't feel right. So we work really hard to curate uh delivery that's actually going to be brought forward at various different rates through the life cycle of a scheme.

SPEAKER_00 34:14

And which you know gets back, you know, the the whole point about flexibility and um you know the amount that things change during the life cycle of the site. So you're dealing with these large sites and you know you can plan and and tweak and you know change the you know the product that you're delivering. But what is the secret to actually creating a community that that works, that has vitality rather than just um a group of homes. And how do you make that happen?

SPEAKER_01 34:46

Oh, that's I mean, that's where the fun happens, to be honest. That's that that the you know, the secret source, the magic, you know, there are undoubtedly a number of different elements that in our experience you you have to pull together. And a master developer is incentivized to be able to pull together. I I often explain it like this to those that approach these discussions from a slightly more cynical perspective and say, Well, you would say that, wouldn't you? And the answer is, as a master developer, if you're curating a great place, then you're not just creating it and curating it for 250 homes, you're creating it for the duration of maybe five to six thousand homes. And you've got an interest in the land underpinning all of those homes over time. So actually, there is an economic rationale in creating a great place that's perfectly logical because it it assists the leveraged land value of the back end of the of the site. So that's the economic rationale. But actually, as I say, we set out as a business to just with the ambition of doing things right. We we wanted to create great places. There are easier ways to make money in real estate than by doing super strategic sites. You know, that's the health warning that needs to be out there for everybody that's sitting here listening to this and thinking, oh, I'll give that a go. You have to be really built for it, but you also have to be really ambitious with regard to the places that you're bringing forward. And I've I've sat and learned so much from watching people like Nigel in meetings where a great example is the school at Halton, the secondary school at Halton. That was a grade two listed building built for in 1926, a hundred years ago, to be the world's most powerful radio transmitter. And I remember in 2014, 15, he walked into that building for the first time and just looked around it and said, This is going to be the secondary school. And I was going, Oh God, just just just pace yourself. That's not what the planning says. You know, that's a big ask. And he says, no, no, this is going to be the secondary school. And the reason this is going to be the secondary school is because if we don't do it, this building will sit there like a white elephant. We just won't be able to find a proper use for it. We need a proper second life. But also, there is a grandeur to this building. There is a power to this building that actually, if put into an educational context, would inspire students. And as a result, it is worth fighting for. And lo and behold, over the course of the next four years, right the way up to when we were delivering it during the pandemic, he navigated and encouraged and cajoled and brought together the various different experts and bodies that underpinned that becoming the most awarded new secondary school in the country to the point where it won the Reba Reinvention Award the first time it was presented alongside the Sterling Prize. And you know, I go into that building on a regular basis, I take tours around that building, I've gone and spoken to the students in that building, and on every occasion I can honestly tell you he was spot on with being it is an uplifting experience. But a grade two listed conversion, which we had to deliver as a business because there was no way we were going to be able to pay the money over to the local education authority to do it because they wouldn't take the risk, delivered under contract through COVID, and opening on time and on budget was an extraordinary feat, and one which defines that site as a place and the ambition of the business as a whole in a way that no amount of words could ever replicate. The secondary school was actually accelerated before it was technically required under the planning consent via a repayable grant that came through located from DFE because they needed a new secondary school in the area. Again, it goes to the point, Susan, that you know flexibility is better than prophecy. There was a need for an educational delivery within that area. We had both the long-term investment and the ability to deliver it, uh, and we got on and did that. And we are now repaying that grant through the Section 106 triggers in the original planning consent, so that in essence it's it's cost neutral for us, but it's place beneficial and regional beneficial uh for the area as a whole.

SPEAKER_00 39:41

And what else is there now at Halton?

SPEAKER_01 39:44

It's a fantastic site. I would encourage all of your listeners, um, if you're up in rugby, go and have a look at Halton. Um you've now got one primary school with uh two FE fully operational, uh, you've got a nursery, you've got another primary school being built alongside the secondary school to be able to provide an all through years academy. You've got this extraordinary secondary school, which has a sports hall that we invested in above and beyond the budget in order to make that a community facility, because we built it to sport England requirements rather than DFE requirements. There's a story in that whereby the actual specifications are different, which is a limiting factor for sports halls that have been brought forward just to DFE specs. You've got a number of cafes on site, including the extraordinary Tuning Fork Cafe, which is run by a local family and has been since its inception, and it was open before the first house was available to buy. You've got a co-op, you've got a co-working space, you've got a David Lloyd center, um, and you're coming up to 1,500 homes on that site. And it's a fantastic site, which also, and I this is where I get teased a little bit by my colleagues, but you know, back in the day I had a slide when I was taking that through planning, which was a newt carrying a flagpole which said, you might have a housing crisis, but so do we. And we had to accommodate a median population of great crested newts on site. It was before district level licensing. And we did, and we we put that infrastructure in, and that extraordinary green infrastructure, which feels like veins of green running through the site, now actually achieves a 28.8% projected biodiversity net gain. Now, BNG was not a twinkle in the eye at 2014 consent, but has now come about to be. And you know, we often take groups up there, including Natural Ingden and others, to be able to show what landscape-led development can look like. And it again is part of the reason we bought a tree nursery last year, because that gave us access to and the ability to stock up on the types of raw material that we as master developers use most frequently, which is landscape rather than bricks and border.

SPEAKER_00 42:00

It makes a lot of sense. And since you mentioned biodiversity net gain, how's the adopted beaver?

SPEAKER_01 42:09

You might need to set that in a little bit of context, Susan. But the um I enjoyed doing that talk on BNG um about three, four years ago now. And if you ever get invited to a talk by it by Susan, then you should be aware that you may be given an adopted animal as a thank you. And it it comes in the form of a certificate rather than the actual animal itself. But that certificate is sat proudly alongside uh my desk and continues to do so. But biodiversity net gain is one of those areas which I think as a country we should be very proud of that actually we've managed to create uh an environmental market by virtue of a consistent measuring tool, a demand, and a supply. But by no means is it complete, finished, and perfect. And so we've got to keep working at it. And you can see the way in which the government have been doing that at the smaller end of the development spectrum, and I'm actively encouraging them to also think about it from the larger end of the development spectrum. And it'd be remiss of me not to take this opportunity to say one of the reasons I'm keen to do that is because at the moment the primary legislation for biodiversity net gain creates a 30-year monitoring and management regime for any on-site biodiversity net gain. But the way it's drafted is that that 30-year period only kicks in at the substantial completion of the development. Now, if you're delivering a development that's going to take 25 to 30 years to substantially complete, that means that the 30 year management regime will only kick in at the completion of that development, meaning that you will be managing the biodiversity net gain on site for 25 years before the 30 year period kicks in. And that is not intended. It is an It is a challenge in the drafting, and it's not been what's replicated in the national infrastructure uh project approach to BNG. So discussions are ongoing on that, but it is definitely something to watch out for if you are delivering a larger scale scheme that you've got to factor in that 30-year period starting upon the substantial completion currently.

SPEAKER_00 44:21

And do you think that biodiversity net gain is actually changing developer behaviour, or is it just creating another level of compliance at the moment?

SPEAKER_01 44:31

Well, I would put it this way. Go back to my 2014 example. What were we talking about at Halton back then? We were talking about habitat regulation because that was what was in people's minds at that time. Biodiversity net gain is now in people's minds. And the idea that you are going to be leaving a place at the completion of the development in a better state of biodiversity than when you found it is not something I think anybody would say is inherently wrong. It's, you know, there is an issue with brownfield sites and open mosaic habitats, but that's being addressed to a degree. But I don't think any of us in the development sector would say, yeah, we we want to destroy biodiversity by virtue of what we are bringing forward. So it's given us a mechanism and a focus by which to be able to address that. And I think that's a positive. And I think we should recognise the fact that actually the rest of the world is looking at the way in which we have done this in this country and created a regulated environmental market. There are challenges and there are inefficiencies, and that's true of any system. But I don't think personally that I would regard this as a bad thing to have done. I would actively encourage people to look at it as an opportunity to leave your footprint of your development in a better state than when you found it. You focus heavily on the bricks and mortar and the placemaking that that creates. Why not the nature that surrounds it? But it does rely upon others as well, including local authorities and county councils as current leaders standing, to then start being more accommodating of biodiversity net gain too, rather than just regard the management of those as an operational headache to deal with subsequently. So it it it it's something we've all got to address. But I I welcome it.

SPEAKER_00 46:21

So just in in practical terms, you will master plan a site, you will then bring in the house builders to build the houses on that site rather than build them yourselves.

SPEAKER_01 46:36

Yeah, in the main. Um that's absolutely right. So put it simply, our model is you acquire the land either directly or synthetically. Um uh and by that means I you control the site. Um you have an interest in the whole site. You get an outline planning, uh flexible outline planning across the entire site, and then you get on with the delivery of a phase of that site. As the master developer, you will be putting in the green, the grey, and the community infrastructure to create the framework into which our customers, who are the house builders, the SME house builders, the national house builders, the build-to-rent investors, the affordable housing providers, will then drop in their product, which is the houses that they are bringing forward. Now, we don't let them just drop in anything, but at the same time, we don't expect them to fundamentally redesign their product in order to deliver on our site. So there's a balance there. I often liken it to buying a car. You don't go into a car showroom and say, here's a picture of a car I drew. I'd like you to sell me that car. You actually go into the car showroom and say, show me the different ranges of houses, the different prices and everything else, and then you say, Okay, well, look, can we do that with that modification and the like? That's the sort of discussion that we have with our house building customers, and we push quality, there's no doubt about it. And we also sign off reserve matters applications before they go in, which is a big help for local authorities as well, is understanding that we are invested in that quality for the same reasons I was discussing earlier, and therefore we're aligned with them as local authorities in trying to create great places. The house builders deliver the homes, they then sell them to the homeowners. We will be doing more of the direct delivery of the built-to-rent housing ourselves, so we will be contracting with different suppliers, MMC, other house builders, uh contractors in order to be able to deliver the build-to-rent housing. And then also you've got the commercial buildings on a number of sites as well, which are then done in different deals. But ultimately, the master developer is is the overall overseer of the site, and they are managing all of those different elements and also ensuring fairness between those customers. Because I think one of the problems that had existed on portfolio sites before we really adopted the sort of model we're adopting is that people would be sold a parcel of land and then just allowed to get on with it. And then house builders being house builders would have been enjoyably competitive with each other and and a bit naughty about the way in which they might be putting their um uh you know, their diggers or their stack of materials or their flags and you know, trying to outflag each other. All of that is very, very carefully regulated on our sites to maintain parity across the board. And and that's you know, actually really welcomed by our house builders and extends down into health and safety consortium meetings and sustainability discussions and community engagement. So you often see our house builders getting involved with community activities that that the UNC team are curating, but which they are then joining in with and and feeling that they're involved in that community creation.

SPEAKER_00 50:03

And you mentioned MMC, and and one of the things I I'm I'm wondering about with these like very large sites, are there enough people with the construction skills that you that you need to bring in to build the homes and other units? Because we keep hearing that they're just, you know, we don't have the construction skills. So is it going to have to be off-site construction?

SPEAKER_01 50:28

Yeah, I mean the go back to a couple of years with Homes England's massive enthusiasm for promoting different types of modern methods of construction contractors. Uh, and you know, you saw some of the house builders setting up their own factories uh and the like. There was definitely a sort of a rush of blood to the head with that. And it's not all of them have survived, but it doesn't mean that the fundamental premise is wrong and that at a certain point in time you will see greater diversity of supply coming forward in the market. And you're actually beginning to see what we would have defined very, you know, as again, modern methods of construction is a bit of a Wild West phrase, as I like to call it at season I mean. It's like, you know, it's steel, it's wood, it's off-site construction, it's panelized, y you name it. There's you know, there's everybody saying it's it's it's modern methods of construction. But you are seeing house builders incorporating. I mean, Barrett have a very extensive MMC uh division now where they're looking at timber frame processes and they're also refining what they can do on-site and off-site as well. And that will, I'm sure, continue. So I I think it will it's something that hasn't quite caught fire yet. The individual independent businesses struggle to get the demand that they needed in order to scale. Whether that will happen at a certain point remains to be seen, but the house builders are starting to take those learnings and those efficiencies within and into their processes, and we are we are seeing that.

SPEAKER_00 52:05

Yes, it'd be interesting to see how things move forward on on that front. So as we draw to a close, I just wondered what sort of most excites you. I mean and what sort of change you expect to see just looking, you know, over the next sort of five to ten years at urban and civic.

SPEAKER_01 52:27

I love that question. I love that question. I mean, the so the paper that I wrote for the Oxford Planning Conference last year starts with a quote, which is that the only thing you can be certain of is change. And I think that's the the key lesson that you've got to be prepared for in this market at the moment and in this particular state of technological evolution that we're in. I am insatiably curious as an individual. I just I just love learning about the history of a site or the the way in which we might be doing things. You know, I'm fascinated by politics and the way in which we're going to have to manage a new political landscape and navigate a new political landscape. It is extraordinary to me that actually the last prime minister to serve a full parliamentary term was David Cameron in 2015. Just think about that for a minute. A full parliamentary term. And, you know, before that, Thatcher did two, Blair did two, and I think Harold Wilson did one. So, I mean, you know, you've got to be prepped for all of this. Matthew Penicook is our fourth longest serving housing minister at the moment, and uh he is only outpaced uh by uh Chris Pincher and Brandon Lewis. If he carries on until July, he'll overtake them. Uh, and then you've got Grant Shaps uh as the as the longest serving, and if he carries on until the end of October, he'll he'll get past them. So politics is going to be changing and we're gonna be learning and evolving with all of that. But but we have had, at least within the Housing Minister, a period of of stability, and that's shown in the in the changes to the system. It would be impossible to answer your question without talking about AI and the role of AI in both our business and also in in the industry as a whole. I am proudly the new head of Urban and Civics Technology Group, and again, you know, the at the grand old age of 51, I'm delighted to say that uh I'm uh I'm enjoying learning about the mechanics there, and I can see the opportunity, I can also see the challenges, and a lot of that will rest upon actual data management and businesses that need to get themselves match fit with their data management in order to maximize the opportunity that AI will bring. Technological innovations around housing and sustainability are ever present and and we will be looking at those as we bring forward the next phases of our site so that they don't just replicate what's gone before. And you can see that in terms of the adoption of the building regulations and the way in which we're moving from gas to air source heat pumps at the moment, uh and different people's views on those. But I think people will continue to want great places to live. There's a there's a really wonderful book called Places for the People by a chap called Eric Kleinberg. And it's worth a read. And what he talks about is that society requires a physical place to be able to operate effectively. You can't have strong societies without well-designed places that facilitate the aggregation and meeting of people. And I think that has underpinned a lot of the way in which UNC has approached the last 16 years. And I think it will continue to be a defining feature of what we seek to do over the next five years, and it will be a differentiator for these places that are coming forward. And I hope they, you know, the communities continue to grow in strength and collegiality. And there are some lovely stories and examples that come from across our portfolio of sites, which just warm the heart on a on a daily basis and actually make you think this is worth doing, this is worth fighting for, this is worth navigating all of those different challenges in order to achieve. So yeah, that's where I would put it.

SPEAKER_00 56:34

Well, that's brilliant. I think that encapsulates it all. I'm just sad we we've got through this podcast without a master developer wrap.

SPEAKER_01 56:42

But um My agent is very restrictive on when I'm able to do that now, so isn't I? Okay. But but it is available to all good viewers of LinkedIn if they ever want to go and have a look at it.

SPEAKER_00 56:52

Absolutely. Uh James, thank you so much. That was really, really, really, really interesting. And I will um have to come and visit the um Halton site in Rugby.

SPEAKER_01 57:03

I'd love to show you around. And uh it's definitely worth doing. Um and then taking the learnings back from things like that to multiple other sites as they as they are uh thought about the art of the possible uh and and dealing with that initial negative reaction that you might have to development, that it can be good and it can be done well, and you've just got to go about doing it in the right way with the right people, with the right ethos.

SPEAKER_00 57:30

Brilliant. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 57:32

Thank you, Susan.

SPEAKER_00 57:35

Thank you so much, James, for some fascinating insights into the urban and civic journey and for talking to us about what goes into creating large-scale, successful, thriving communities. So that's it for now. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. Please join us for the next Property She podcast interview coming very soon. The Property She Podcast is brought to you by Mishcon DeRaya in association with the London Real Estate Forum and can be found at Mishcon.com slash PropertyShe along with all our interviews and programme notes. The podcasts are also available to subscribe to on your Apple Podcast app and on Spotify and whichever podcast platform you use. Do continue to subscribe and let us have your feedback and comments, and most importantly, suggestions for future guests. And of course, you can continue to follow me on LinkedIn and on Twitter at PropertyShe for a very regular commentary on all things real estate, prop tech, and the built environment. See you again soon.