“I think of the city more as a kind of selection box of chocolates rather than, you know, Canary Wharf which is just like 80% dark chocolate, you’ve got to take it or leave it, everything’s the same. We’re a bit more selection, you know, you can have different shapes, different sizes, different ages and a few different use classes and I think it’s that mix that makes it really appealing to be brought into investors.”
Susan Freeman
Hi, I’m Susan Freeman. Welcome back to our PropertyShe podcast series brought to you by Mishcon de Reya 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 am delighted to welcome Tom Sleigh. Tom is the Chair of the Planning and Transportation Committee at the City of London Corporation, overseeing one of the most dynamic and densely developed planning jurisdictions in the country. An elected independent member representing the Ward of Bishopsgate since 2013, Tom has long been at the forefront of shaping the cities built environment and cultural life. He previously chaired the cities Barbican Centre Board, one of Europe’s largest performing arts centre where he launched Barbican Renewal securing 191 million pounds to renovate the iconic centre. He chaired the investment committee, overseeing a 4 billion pound real estate portfolio including over 20% of the square miles freehold estate and many of its iconic heritage sites. Tom brings a unique blend of cultural, political and commercial experience to his role. In addition to his corporation roles, Tom is chair of Goldsmiths University of London, a board member of the Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewals Delivery Authority and chair of the Southbank Employers Group which manages the South Bank bid where he champions place making and cultural lead regeneration across central London. He also co-chairs the Mayor of London’s Cultural Leadership Board. Tom’s professional background includes senior roles at the Bank of London and Amazon UK and earlier work with Lloyds Banking Group, the BBC and Booz Allen Hamilton. A Fulbright scholar and Cambridge graduate he combines strategic rigor with a deep understanding of how great cities evolve. So now I’m really looking forward to hearing from Tom Sleigh on his vision for the cities Square Mile and what changes we’re likely to see under his stewardship.
Tom good morning, welcome. Thank you for joining us this morning.
Tom Sleigh
Good morning, thank you for having me.
Susan Freeman
I have been looking forward to his, uh, conversation because you’ve had such an interesting career that crosses so many sectors from Amazon and Lloyds to now the City of London Corporation and I wondered, is there a common thread running through all this?
Tom Sleigh
Oh that’s a good question. I mean I think my professional executive life has always been in the city. As it happens the jobs I’ve done have always been in offices pretty much on Bishopsgate which happens to be the Ward I represent as a councillor in the Square Mile which is convenient because I live on Brick Lane round the corner. So I’ve kind of been blessed in the last, I don’t know, 15 years that I’ve been able to walk to work which is really nice. So that kind of gives me that user experience of the streets and, and looking up at the, the architecture and the buildings. My roles have typically been in public affairs, government relations, strategy type roles, interfacing with the public sector and then I guess, in parallel with that I’ve been a councillor elected in the City of London for 13 years now so I’ve always really in my professional life, had a kind of concurrent role in public service and I’ve always been drawn to public service.
Susan Freeman
And was there anything in particular that moved you into the public service as, um, well your role is now City of London chair of Planning and Transportation so I just wondered if there was any tipping point?
Tom Sleigh
I don’t think it was tipping point, so kind of I was brought up in a family with my parents were Local Authority civil servants so they as professionals were kind of public servants and when I moved to London, gosh at the turn of the millennia which seems like a long time ago, I knew that I wanted to also do something like that. And look, everyone has their own way of giving back. I mean some people just give money to charity, some people volunteer. There’s lots of ways people to choose to do that and I kind of thought well actually based upon my interests, I studied politics at university and I think I guess my skill set actually being an elected councillor made sense. Now I live in Tower Hamlets and the one rule of politics in Tower Hamlets is don’t do politics in Tower Hamlets. I mean it’s, it’s I’m afraid a bit of a basket case. City of London by contrast is a very interesting thoughtful place where you can get a lot out as a Local Authority council member and duly over the last, I don’t know, 13 years since I first got elected, I’ve had a really interesting kind of series of roles and got a load out of it and I guess that’s been the route that I have chosen to give back.
Susan Freeman
And you were chair of the, um, the Barbican Centre I think for 4 years and you did a lot in that time. You, you secured major investment for the, um, renewal of the estate and I just wondered, you know, whether there are any lessons from managing a cultural lead organisation with multiple stakeholders that you brought into the role in planning?
Tom Sleigh
Absolutely. If you think of the Barbican, which is Europe’s largest art centre and you think, who are its stakeholders or you have obviously audiences who love the place and a million people go through its doors every year. You have, have the broader public who see the Barbican as an important institution in the heart of their, of their city here in London. You have artists of pretty much every kind of art form from theatre through to visual arts. You have young people that the Barbican works with in its outreach programmes. And crucially you also have staff and, and cultural institutions often have staff who are a little bit younger than the average, uh, there’s a lot of Gen Zs, a lot of, you know, in between Gen Zs and Millennials who are hyper socially aware and they’re very vocal and they expect certain things from their institution. They often expect the institution to take political positions on topics which can be a challenge. So yeah, as Barbican chair you really have to like, engage with really different stakeholder groups that knew what they thought and expected the institution as expressed through me as chair or the CEOs to like respond to them. Planning is different. I mean it’s a statutory committee so you have a very clear set of policy guidelines around how you operate. You can only bring papers to committee that offices have presented, you know, you have to take decisions that are legally compliant and defensible against future legal action and all that stuff. So it’s kind of much more rigid but you have similar stakeholder groups. So in the city, right in the heart of London you have heritage groups who take a real interest in the heritage assets, the impact of development on heritage assets. You have passenger groups, people who represent passengers of the, you know, the mainline and the tube stations where particularly when we’re dealing with planning applications that affect them. You have developers who want to get things built, you have residents, you have a different view on what perhaps should get built where. The City Corporation is a stakeholder, which sounds strange because it is the Corporations Planning Committee but the Planning Committee is different to the Corporation and it legally has to be so we, we have to a Chinese rule there. So yeah, I have to balance all of them and it’s a challenge but it, I guess, keeps it interesting.
Susan Freeman
Sounds very interesting and before we sort of drill down into, you know, the city and some of the stakeholders that you, you mentioned, it would be interesting to hear from you what you’ve seen in terms of investor sentiment because I know you’ve been on a recent Opportunity London delegation to the Middle East. I just wondered if you were heartened from what you heard from potential investors and what they are saying about the city?
Tom Sleigh
Yeah, so I think there are two parts to that. One is, what are the actual numbers and one is, what is the investor sentiment. Fundamentally the numbers are good. I mean we’re seeing an uptick in investor confidence as expressed through, for example, pressure on rents going up as expressed through a really vital, vibrant pipeline. We had our best January, our best February in many years in terms of planning applications, there’s a lot coming in the door. We know from anecdotal meetings with developers and investors and we know from the kind of market reports that you get from these data providing companies that investor confidence is turning up now and we’re particularly seeing that in commercial real estate which frankly the city is predominantly commercial real estate, not other asset classes. So the numbers are good. On the trip side to it, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, yeah I think it was similar. I mean people are very interested. People are interested in investing in core prime real estate in the city. Some are interested in investing in the kind of retrofit stuff that we’re putting on as well and we’re encouraging. The coder to that I think is people in a lot of those meetings did raise perception of crime in London and we really had to go into some lengths to explain, you know, the facts kind of don’t agree with that perception. In fact our crime, say violent crime is at a record low and crime is coming down. There are some hot spots and I was really pleased to see the Mayor of London and London & Partners have been leading the charge on frankly, debunking the myths around crime in London because they aren’t true and I understand that some of the more detailed investigations that have been conducted, I assume by data analysis firms, possibly the police and the security services, are these are State sponsored actions. So someone or some people out there are doing their very best to underline confidence in London. Now we can only speculate why but we know it’s happening. So I’m glad that at least something is being done to dispel that. So not withstanding that, investor confidence were good. I mean, we had a lot of productive meetings in all those countries. People want to come and pile into real estate in the Square Mile. I mean, we can’t build it quick enough.
Susan Freeman
And I know you support Opportunity London and I think the city also has its own business unit to attract global capital and support overseas investors?
Tom Sleigh
Yes it’s called the City Business Investment Unit. So it does what it says on the tin. We are recruiting the person to run that. The whole team is being assembled. I would think of it as a part of the corporation that is there to promote real estate investment in the city, partly to promote where the corporation has its own physical assets, bear in mind we own about 20 something percent of the freeholds of the Square Mile. We’ve got some big strategic sites; Smithfield Market for example is one big example, when the meat market move out in a few years. But also to kind of match make, so understand what are the sites around that are vacant, that might be becoming vacant. They might be going through a lease event that have planning permission to be redeveloped that haven’t been redeveloped yet. And then matchmaking with firms that want to come to London and into the city, the firms that might be here that want to expand and so they’re kind of both looking at those who are here, those who are internationally and matching them up with lots of real estate opportunities. And, you know, we’ve been doing that work anyway for quite a few years. The Corporation has always done that but this is just giving it much more focus through a very specific team. So you know, if you are an international investor or if you’re a big firm and you want to bring your headquarters to London like you know the doorway to go through to get the best advice.
Susan Freeman
Sounds brilliant and since, um, we have MIPIM coming up next week all being well, I assume you will be there flying the flag for the city?
Tom Sleigh
I will, I’ve never been to MIPIM. I’m really excited about going. I don’t know quite what to expect but the one thing I know that will happen is that I will be rushed off my feet and I’ve already seen my diary for MIPIM and the team have put in kind of, not just back-to-back things but like in the evenings you do starter at one event, main course at another, maybe, maybe pudding at a third. So maybe I need a prophylactic ozempic shot before I go to help me out, I’m not sure. But yeah, it’s going to be busy.
Susan Freeman
Well I think I’ve been to most MIPIMs so, uh, I think…
Tom Sleigh
Ah, do you have any advice for me?
Susan Freeman
Yes. No, no alcohol and, uh, pace yourself and be focussed. I am sure you will be focussed and, you know, just focus on the key people that you want to meet because the strange thing about MIPIM is that everybody from London sort of suddenly says, oh well why don’t we meet up at, um, at MIPIM when actually you could meet up at home, so.
Tom Sleigh
Good, well lucky I don’t drink anyway so that’s, that’s one box ticked. And I have asked to build a bit of downtime and even like a hour before evenings kick off. So yeah, I’m excited and, you know, it’s, it’s a very good time for us in the city to be going to MIPIM because we are feeling really confident. I mean, like I said, we can’t build enough grade A really to keep up with demand. We are just keeping ahead of it which is fantastic. We have a brilliant pipeline. We’re going to keep incenting as long as they are legally compliant schemes. We’ve got some huge, huge recently consented projects, you know, if I just think about two and a half weeks ago we approved Liverpool Street Station, you know, it’s Britain’s busiest train station and Network Rail wanted to put an over station development on it and we said, after a fairly long and fairly high profile meeting, we said yes and that thing will deliver, you know, thousands and thousands of jobs in construction. Thousands of jobs in high quality office, tons of desk based jobs. It will deliver tons of prime grade A real estate right above a train station which is the most sustainable place in the country that you can build an office, so it’s great.
Susan Freeman
I know there’s been some sort of push back on the heritage side. What might be quite useful is to hear from you, what are the heritage aspects that are going to be, um, impacted by the scheme?
Tom Sleigh
Well actually very few. And this came up and was debated at length in committee. So Liverpool Street Station is a Victorian station. But in the 1990s a ton of the Victorian stuff was ripped down and a 1990s kind of fake version was added which is what people now see, it’s the main concourse. That’s 1990s. The proposal that we consented would replace the 1990s part and not touch any of the Victorian part. So we didn’t really understand where, for example, the Victorian Society were coming from by objecting to this quite so vociferously when no Victorian architecture is being removed. Their objection kind of landed broadly in they are annoyed about the adjacency of modern to old but all you have to do is turn your head and look around and the city is full of adjacency of modern and old. That’s what it is, that’s part of its kind of, the way it presents to people. So they kind of felt, in my view and I said this in the meeting, that they, they kind of felt like they were basically arguing Victorian’s deserved a new train station. People 40 years ago in the 90s, deserved a new train station but we don’t deserve one today for arguments that just, in my view at the time, you know, didn’t stack up.
Susan Freeman
And you mentioned obviously, um, that sort of heritage assets are one of the stakeholders, I mean this must be a constant theme actually balancing innovation, you know, modern, state of the art buildings against the heritage assets that you’ve got in the city. So it must be quite a difficult thing to do?
Tom Sleigh
Yeah I don’t think it’s against. So that word, against, really is right. I think if you, if you consider that the city has 50’ish churches, most designed by Christopher Wren. It’s got a few dozen ancient scheduled monuments, it’s got 200 listed buildings. Guildhall where I am in today, our office, Mansion House another one of our operational bodies, like these are heritage assets. No one cares more about the heritage of the Square Mile than the City of London Corporation. I mean but a lot of it we actually have custodianship over. There’s a tension I think that definitely exists between the scale and densification of development and we do see that. We see that in objections sometimes from heritage groups to bigger schemes and in particular we see it over nervousness by some of the heritage sector around our cluster of tall buildings that you’ll see in the East of the city. We are told sometimes by these groups that they are worried that building up the cluster, intensifying it more might threaten the UNESCO status of the world heritage site of the Tower of London. Now we just happen to disagree. We have a fantastic heritage team. We have more heritage and design offices I think than probably any other Local Authority in the country. They are incredibly good at their jobs. Our Local Plan which defines the shape and the size of that cluster has been through His Majesty’s inspections process. They’re doing a final check on it now but, in that first process they heard all these arguments, they heard these arguments from the heritage groups and they basically were okay with it. And so I think it’s one of those points where you kind of have to agree to disagree. Somebody more confident than I on this, might say, don’t get distracted too much by the UNESCO thing because frankly when you come to London, do you google UNESCO site in London or do you google Tower of London. My view, I suspect is if you really looked at it hard, UNESCO probably need the Tower more than the Tower needs UNESCO. However, that’s a bit controversial so. I think the reality of this point is the city has evolved enormously in the last 20 or 30 years and the way that some organisations calibrate their view around heritage, in particular around the Tower of London is kind of still rooted in a 1980s, 1990s view of the world which is before the cluster was built. They have like said, well maybe there’s a different way of looking at it. Maybe we have to accept the reality that the city is a bustling, busy, like large scale thriving place and that maybe we need to figure out a way that heritage can be celebrated within that context. The other point I think is they are often quite fixated on very specific narrow view points. So one view point that often comes up is standing on the north bastion of Tower Bridge and looking at the Tower of London and seeing that with the kind of relief of the city cluster behind it and that’s a very fixed point that everyone gets focussed on but it kind of ignores the fact that people; tourists, city workers, residents, don’t experience cities from fixed viewpoints, right. They experience cities dynamically as they move around and that maybe there’s a more modern way of viewing the heritage assets in a more dynamic fashion. The other, the other point to say is the whole site of the cluster, where it is and the whole shape of the cluster that it rises up to a point in the middle and them kind of rises down towards the edges, is that it is already paying deference to the heritage assets we have. I mean the kind of triangle shape of the cluster is a triangle shape because of the restricted views of St Pauls Cathedral and the cluster declining towards this eastern edge is entirely because of the Tower of London. So this is probably a city that has more heritage restrictions on its buildings than any other on the planet already so I think everyone should probably kind of figure out maybe there’s a slightly more modern way of, of seeing it. And I think we could frankly, much more robustly defend the position of the Tower of London in the context of the city and say to UNESCO and others, actually you know what, we think the British planning system which is the best in the world, it’s the gold standard, it’s the Rolls Royce, is perfectly capable of defending our heritage assets. We’ve done it very well so far and we will continue to do so.
Susan Freeman
Well I’m with you. I mean I, I love the juxtaposition of sort of old and new and I mean, I always think of the Musée d’Orsay in, in Paris, you know, old building with a sort of very modern interior and it just works. Now you touched on the, um, on the City Plan and, um, I think the City Plan 2040 is in its final consultation phase at the moment and I just wondered whether there are any sort of particular changes that, um, developers should pay most attention to?
Tom Sleigh
Yeah I think there are three things. The first is, the whole City Plan is underpinned by really robust evidence base. Probably the more most robustly evidenced City Plan or Local Plan in the country. And that will be our master planning framework for a good 15 years so it’s really important. And that evidence base tells us London has growth ambitions, like growth requires office space because jobs require desks and desks require offices. Even post-pandemic by the way, it’s been calibrated for that. And 80% of London’s commercial office space, new, newly built will have to be in the Square Mile. So that’s the first thing. So we have very, very clear growth ambitions that underpins everything. It’ll be at least 1.2 million square metres by 2040, I suspect the real number needs to be higher but that’s where we are today. The second is, we are moving from a presumption that you can do anything you want in terms of demolition to you need to really demonstrate rigorously why a site needs to be demolished, i.e., we’re moving to retrofit first as a presumption. Not retrofit only but retrofit first. And then the third one, which I think relates to this is it’s, we’re trying to make it easier to have environmentally sustainable, lower carbon impact developments. We’ve got loads of toolkits that come out about City Plan around material re-use, carbon re-use, carbon optioneering. We encourage sustainability, we encourage retrofitting and we’ve got this very innovative approach to bio diversity. So there is a strategy requirement across the country that essentially sites have to, uh, have a positive impact on bio diversity depending on how much there is already on site. Now the problem with the city is there is basically none so most of these sites that are being redeveloped fall out of that regulation. So you could just say, oh there’s nothing to do around bio diversity, you’re not caught by the regs. What we’ve done instead is baseline of bio diversity in the city, we’ve created a metric, a proxy metric and we’ve said every site that is developed has to have and deliver a certain amount on this metric of new biodiversity. So we’re seeing that expressed through street gardens, new green walk ways around buildings and crucially these kind of elevated gardens you see on a lot of buildings. The Liverpool Street Station development when its built will be London’s biggest new roof garden. That has a big impact on bio diversity. So, I think those are the three things; growth through commercial office space, retrofit first, not retrofit only and thinking harder and making it easier about the sustainability and bio diversity agenda.
Susan Freeman
And in relation to the gardens, I think you’ve indicated that there may be a change in the requirement for the sort of sky garden viewing platforms which, um, have been a feature over the last few years?
Tom Sleigh
I don’t think the requirement will change. I think we need to have an intellectual conversation at some point about the number of these large public viewing galleries just because there is conceivably a point where you have more than you need from just in terms of supply and demand. I don’t think we’re there yet. These are enormously popular places. I think actually the conversation that’s more interesting is these are part of the way that developers are made and required by planners to give back to the public. So if you’re going to build a big tower in this kind of dense urban environment, it is unlikely you are going to be able to create an enormous new park next door because there just isn’t the footprint available at ground floor level. So how do you give back? So sky gardens or elevated viewing platforms, they’re not always gardens, are one part of that. But we’re moving to also encouraging, for example, cultural use. So we consented a scheme that had a theatre or will have a theatre in its ground floor when that opens. We’ve approved a brilliant scheme on Gracechurch Street where the developer found they had the remains of the Roman Forum in the basement. So they’re now going, when that’s built, open up a free to use museum that accesses that archaeological history. It’s another way of giving back. So actually the big picture is how do developers give back in the city. They give back a lot and that’s because we, through City Plan, through the way our planners interact with them, the expectations we have of them, make them do it. Um, and they’re happy to do it because they do see that the impact it has on the Square Mile and if the Square Mile thrives then of course the real estate sector thrives.
Susan Freeman
And what do you think is the future of the unsustainable older office buildings that just don’t really work as offices. Are you going to be encouraging other uses?
Tom Sleigh
I mean first of all I think more of those buildings are retrofitable to good quality office space than people think and we’re bringing in additional policy guidelines around that to make it easier. There’s a retrofit toolkit, there’s a fast track application process for retrofit. But, yes we are seeing change of use, so only the other day, I went to the opening of a new hotel. It was a Premier Inn, it was a retrofit of a building that had heritage components to it and it’s a really fantastic, sensitive redeployment of what was essentially an unused asset that couldn’t really have been brought up to speed for, for office use. I suppose the other thing to say about that is that this is part of what we call Destination City. So Destination City is our growth strategy, it’s how do we activate the Square Mile, not just 9 to 5, Monday to Fridays but evenings and weekends too. That means more hotels, that means a lively retail, leisure, hospitality offer often at ground floor and so some of those buildings that you talked about in the question, are the buildings that will be delivering that whether it’s through hotels, whether it’s through health and wellbeing or similar kind of ancillary stuff.
Susan Freeman
And historically the city hasn’t encouraged residential use. Do you see that changing?
Tom Sleigh
No it won’t change. We have actually met our targets for new residential units in the Square Mile and we will always meet our targets, that’s crucial. They are set for us by the Major of London. So we’re doing what we’re being asked to do. We also build a lot of housing and spend a lot of money on housing outside the Square Mile. So that’s sometimes our own housing stock that we manage in other Boroughs and sometimes it’s the money from the Section 106 Agreements, goes towards social housing elsewhere. London works the way it works and I think it works well where you have the city as a central business district, predominantly business focussed. There’s something around the agglomeration and a concentration and the focus that works. And then the other Boroughs, which are not far away, the immediately continuous Boroughs and further, they are where people chose to live and they come in on our amazing public transport network that gets them in, you know, in minutes now days.
Susan Freeman
But student and co-living seem to work in the city?
Tom Sleigh
Yeah there’s a little bit, a little bit in the East. I visited a campus for post-grads from an American University, that seemed to be working well. But it’s a relatively small, I mean it’s a very small part of, of the offer and I think, I think that one was also a retrofit of a building. So a little bit of a change of use. I mean, if the question is, are you going to see, you know, student accommodation towers across the Square Mile? I mean the answer’s no. But I think of the city more as a kind of selection box of chocolates rather than, you know, Canary Wharf, which is just like 80% dark chocolate, you’ve got to take it or leave it, everything’s the same. We’re a bit more selection, you know, you can have different shapes, different sizes, different ages and a few different use classes and I think it’s that mix that makes it really appealing to be brought into investors.
Susan Freeman
I think that’s a really interesting analogy, I like that. So I think there’s going to be more of an emphasis on improved air quality and, and better public spaces as you alluded to. Does that necessarily mean more pedestrianisation?
Tom Sleigh
So, air quality is improving, dramatically so since, you know, a few decades ago. And we have a very clear transportation policy and by the way I’m also chairman of Transportation, it’s Planning and Transportation, everyone forgets the transportation. We have a very clear policy that we want to encourage public transport, we want to encourage active travel, we want to encourage where possible, walking, wheeling, cycling. Uh, and you see all these different modes now; some people cycling on their own bikes, loads of people are using dockless e-bikes and so on and the volume of car travel through the Square Mile is insignificant compared to, you know, the 1980s or the 70s where there were enormous car parks all over the city, a terrible use of space car parks in the city, much better to have offices and have people come in on something like the twelve different tube stations that we have. Are we going to close more roads? I don’t think we’ve got any plans right now to close more roads but I mean it’s one of those you just have to keep, keep reviewing. You look at user statistics, you look at demand and you look at pollution levels. We’re certainly trying to find policy interventions that make it easier for people to move around actively. I would say that. But I don’t think we want to be seen as like, I think it’s a bit simplistic to say, oh you’re just anti car, you know, you just want everyone to cycle in. What about people who can’t cycle? I think it’s a bit simplistic. I think everyone benefits if you optimise the public transport and you optimise for active travel but you accept there will of course have to be, you know, motor vehicle, electronic vehicle for various reasons for, for people who are not that able bodied, for deliveries and so on.
Susan Freeman
It looks as if we’ll have the driverless car to contend with shortly as well?
Tom Sleigh
Yeah, I met Waymo when I was over in Los Angeles. I went to their HQ. Went around in a Waymo. I think it’s great. We won’t be regulating them, that’ll be a Central London Transport for London thing. They work well. They were interesting and, you know, it will be good to see them because it will give people a choice and ultimately the users of different forms of transportation will be the ones that chose what they want. Uh, and it will be, you know, it’s good for the city and it’s good for London to have a mix of options, you know, the free market works well in this.
Susan Freeman
It’ll be interesting. You mentioned, uh, Smithfields Market and, um, obviously it’s a great opportunity for, um, regeneration and I believe the London Museum is, is going in. I just wondered what plans you had for the rest of the market when the, when the traders are relocated?
Tom Sleigh
We don’t know. A lot of work is going on behind the scenes and bear in mind, my role in this will be, well it will really come long after I’ve been playing chair, will be to receive potentially planning applications for the site. I think the Corporation is still thinking. I think the Act of Parliament still has to go through so there’s a piece of policy that we don’t want to pre-judge. But, um, what I can say is I know lots of people, lots of organisations have got lots of really good ideas about what can go there. I’ve heard everything from concert halls, exhibition spaces, theatres, you know, event spaces. Who knows! What I do know is that it is an enormous, exciting central site and, you know, it has the opportunity to be really transformative for that part of London.
Susan Freeman
It’s going to be exciting whatever, whatever it is. We talked a little bit about, um, you know, some of the high profile planning decisions you have to deal with and some of them attract National and even International attention and I just wondered how you personally deal with the spotlight and navigating the politics of those debates?
Tom Sleigh
Well actually so far, touch wood, it hasn’t been personalised. I’ve not been singled out, I don’t think and quite right too. I mean I would say that but, you know, as I said at the beginning, planning is a kind of quasi strategy committee so your role as planning chair is not to like personally take sides, it’s to make sure that the committee have the right level of evidence, the right quality of officer reports, that your decision and your conversations within that committee meeting are anchored in fact, not personal taste and that everyone has their say, everyone has their day and then at the end of that process, a right, evidence based, legally justifiable decision is made. So there’s no reason for it to be personalised and if it does, well that’s a shame but I’ve been lucky and it hasn’t for me.
Susan Freeman
Well that’s good. You’ve been quoted as saying that you want the most beautiful and future ready buildings in the country and, um, architecture that lifts the spirits. I just wondered how you go about assessing design quality because it always seems to me that it actually is quite subjective and, you know, really what, what constitutes great design?
Tom Sleigh
When I said that, that was the first interview I gave as planning chair and I have to say I slightly regret using those words because I always get asked now, like what buildings do you like, what buildings do you hate, which architects do you like and of course it’s like, you know, a teacher choosing their favourite students. You’re not really allowed to. But the question is, how do we consider design quality. We have this amazing team. I think there’s about 13 of them and we have a framework for assessing design quality. Crucially the committee you are not allowed to bring personal taste in. So you couldn’t for example in the committee say, I don’t like the look of it, it’s a horrible colour. You could probably find a way within, you know, regulations to express that in a compliant way. But you can’t legally bring personal taste in. So how do the city think about design quality? I think there’s a few, few components to this. I mean one is around internal kind of coherency. Does it as a building make sense the way it looks, the way it’s proportioned, the way it works? There’s something around it’s kind of periphery, how does it interplay with the buildings around it? It doesn’t have to mimic them, in fact mimicking is often worse than having a coherent building in its own right but there’s something around the adjoining edges of the building, how it meets what’s around it. I think confidence in a building, we want useful but interesting confident buildings. Increasingly there’s staying power and there’s two parts to staying power; one is the bones of the building, are they good, will they last, could it be refitted when we go for the next round of retrofits in whatever, 40/50 years but also staying power which does stray into this objective like, is it I suppose, timeless. Like is it a style that would work, you know, now but also potentially in the future. You can’t second guess what people will think. So, there’s no single kind of metrics, this is partly why you can’t really use AI to kind of assess a planning application because there is a judgment to be made in the process but that’s kind of the approach that the team take. And then, how is that implemented? Well, one of the complaints that I get from developers is when they enter into the kind of pre-application phase, our team get really stuck in on design and we’re really interested in the quality of the materials, in the staying power of the building, or on the impact it has on its surroundings. And they push the developers hard and rightfully so. So I think by the time a scheme comes to our committee, it’s gone through an incredibly rigorous process, overseen by really well-qualified officers on our side and we get something which is, you know, we would hope ready for approval.
Susan Freeman
And of course the whole development cycle takes so long, you know, you design the building, you go through planning, you agree modifications, you arrange the funding, you start building. By the time you’ve built the building it’s almost, you know, it could be in many ways not something that you would built, you know, had you started a couple of years ago and things, you know, change is just moving so fast at the moment, it must be very difficult to keep up with all that?
Tom Sleigh
Well that’s the risk but I guess the way we manage that risk is by being a fast moving Planning Authority. I have observed in other parts of the country, planning applications for whatever reason getting bogged down. Some of that I think is due to reason or lack of, of local Planning Authorities. We have a pretty decent sized team, we have really well qualified people. We have a very pragmatic kind of enabling approach. The city broadly speaking is just a pro-growth organisation but as a planning team we, we try and see planning as a process that helps enable you do stuff, rather than tries to block you and that mind-set makes a difference. So we get through, I mean like, we don’t do it as far as a developer would like of course we don’t, but actually I think by any, any neutral metric we perform much faster than other Local Authorities.
Susan Freeman
And it’s interesting that you mention staying power because, I mean for developers now the sort of flexibility of the building is front of mind and, you know, they talk about the buildings that went up in the, in the 70s and the, um, early 80s. They just didn’t have any flexibility so it’s very difficult to convert them?
Tom Sleigh
That’s exactly right so that’s the point about having kind of good solid bones that you can retrofit around. I guess another point on this is everyone thought the office was dead after the pandemic and it’s not at all. The numbers show quite the opposite. But what we have seen change is how these offices are used. So occupants want more space and they want a lot more amenity in the office as well. So that needs, needs kind of different types of use within the building, different ceiling to floor heights sometimes, you know, different lay outs. All that stuff’s changed quite, quite radically. So yeah, it’s a mugs game trying to guess how offices will be used in 50 years but I think there are some fundamentals that you can do to ensure there is at least some flexibility should, should they need to change again in the future.
Susan Freeman
It’s interesting, I, um, I recently interviewed David Camp, CEO of Stanhope who are working on 1 Undershaft and we were talking about the amount of amenity that’s going to go in there and I think he was talking about 15%. So that obviously is the direction of travel?
Tom Sleigh
Yeah and that’s a lot, I mean, compared to 20 years ago I bet if we opened up some planning applications from 20 years ago for some of the towers you see today, there’d be virtually zero amenity, maybe a coffee shop, you know, probably cycle parking maybe in the ground floor but nothing like you’re seeing today. That is the expectation from the market. And, you know, we want to attract world class companies, their headquarters to come to the city and that means they will come to us if planning applications for these like remarkable spaces with a ton of mixed use and loads of amenity and we have to, you know, look on that in a policy compliant way but ideally benevolently.
Susan Freeman
And just, you, you were talking about the bones of a building and I just, uh, I’d like to talk about something slightly different. The, um, you’ve recently become a non exec director the Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal Committee and that is very difficult to see how that is going to be restored in a way that’s going to keep people happy and to keep government functioning there?
Tom Sleigh
I mean, I think the starting point for this should be if anyone’s interested in that project, which could well be, Europe’s, certainly Britain’s largest heritage restoration project, to read the, the client board report that was laid before Parliament and published recently and that will form the basis of the decision that both the Houses of Parliament have to make regarding the future of the project. I mean I’m, I’m a member of the Delivery Authority. So that’s a kind of quasi limited company set up to do the work that they’ve now done on the options, to do the costings, early designs etcetera. I’ve only quite recently joined it but it is a remarkable project. It is an incredible building. It’s home to 10,000 staff, it’s the mother of Parliaments. It’s a very large site, it’s a complex site with a very long history so yeah, it’s a super, super exciting project and it’s now kind of really with politicians to make a decision on, on where they would like the future of it to go based upon the evidence they have been given.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, it’s just the, the figures that have been quoted, just seem astronomical but, um, we’ll see what happens. So, you are also involved with the Southbank bid, I saw and I chair the Property Group of the Central District Alliance bid so I, I just wanted to ask you, how you see bids fitting into the future of the city and how, you know, how they can help enhance the local community.
Tom Sleigh
So yeah I chair something called the Southbank Employer Group. It’s actually not a bid, uh, but it does run the Southbank bid which is, there is a difference. It’s a 40 year old membership body, it’s members are everything from cultural institutions to property developers to commercial businesses who chose to be a member. Whereas a bid of course, you don’t chose, you have to pay into a levy. So, um, it’s there to kind of promote the Southbank as a tourist destination to encourage, you know, tourism, to keep that build environment hire quality, to manage street cleanliness and, and kind of add to whatever it is the Local Council are doing in the area and bringing together all the different stakeholders to – and it’s strap line is – to make the Southbank a better place for all by working together. So yeah, it’s great. I mean it’s across the river so you kind of see it from here in the city and it’s kind of given me a locus in the centre of London and one place I’m responsible for the planning decisions and the other place I’m kind of chairing a body that’s actively managing and out there on the streets trying to make it a, you know, a more attractable and more investible space.
Susan Freeman
So you talked a little bit about, you know, some of the cultural anchors of the city and we talked about Barbican, Museum of London, obviously there’s also Guildhall. How do you see these institutions, I mean how, how important are they to the future of the city?
Tom Sleigh
So Destination City, this growth strategy, this idea of making the city a magnet for people seven days a week including in, in the evenings and it has to have culture as a cornerstone. We have these institutions here already and the Barbican, Europe’s biggest art centre, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, so many smaller venues, the Churches, theatres popping up. I mean, they’re there already. We could coordinate between them better and we could shout about what they do better but if you’re trying to attract workers to come and work in the firm’s here or tourists from around the world to like earn the, earn the commute or earn the holiday money, you need to have this strong cultural cornerstone. And so yeah, those institutions are absolutely fundamental to that. Now as we speak, about half an hour ago we just issued a press release and that was my planning authority that I chair have now just approved planning permission for Barbican renewal. So this is a flagship redevelopment, the City Corporation investing 191 million pounds in it, of Europe’s largest art centre but also it’s the largest refit of a brutalist building of its age of that scale that’s ever happened. It’s the first of those big brutalist buildings is being done. It’s a sensitive , audience lead, future facing, heritage partnership type approach. It’s been well humised to ARC England, it’s been welcomed by The Twentieth Century Society. It’s incredibly exciting and I am, as a past chair of the committee, absolutely delighted that as a Planning Authority we were able to give them planning permission.
Susan Freeman
That’s really exciting and I, I wonder what you say, I mean there are some developers who still view culture as, you know, nice to have but not necessarily something that’s central to their new creation. What, what do you say to them?
Tom Sleigh
I mean I’ve not met any that say that. I mean it might just be they don’t want to say it to my face but we’re, we’re rather blessed in the city that we work with, I believe, a group of developers who kind of understand what we are. There’s the Square Mile, they understand what we are trying to achieve as a corporation. And they understand the numbers, you know, if you are to maintain or grow a workforce of 675,000 people, if you’re trying to attract businesses and all of this will help by the way, their real estate portfolios. You need something for those people to enjoy when they walk out the office at 5.00 or 6.00 o’clock or do at lunch time. So a load of times it might be you need a really cool amenity, uh, food and beverage offer but the evenings it’s around culture and they get it. I’ve not met developers who groan and moan. In fact I think developers are incredibly grateful that the City of London are spending a lot of money on a cultural offer. I think we are the single largest investor in culture in Britain after the Arts Council. It’s astonishing right. And great, of course all the people who use that are benefitting but the development community are benefitting too. Which is why we have such high expectations of them on all these other things like quality of building and them giving us something back to the public.
Susan Freeman
So if you were looking sort of forward 10 years, what would success look like for you, I mean, in terms of the planning of the city. What would you like to see?
Tom Sleigh
Well look I’m always nervous about legacy questions because I worry it distracts you from the here and now which is ultimately what our job is. I am only in the job for 3 years so, but I’ve got a lot to do at that time. That said, in 10 years, where will we be, 2036. So I would like us to be just over halfway through our City Plan 2040. I’d like us to be well on our way to delivering uplifting new or high quality office space. I’d like to continue to see the city as the retrofit capital of Britain, you know, half of our planning applications are retrofit. I’d want Destination City to not be an emerging policy but actually be what the city is now so it needs to by then be seven day a week, thriving, bustling, tourist, visitor, student, everything else destination. And it needs to be Britain’s central business district and a global financial capital because if it isn’t those, none of the rest of it really works. And finally, on a more personal note, you know, it will be nice to still have a skyline that is unique, uniquely London, that shouts commerce, that shouts growth, that shouts confidence.
Susan Freeman
It sounds good. And, um, I think a good place to, to stop Tom. So thank you very much.
Tom Sleigh
No thank you, I’ve enjoyed it this morning. It’s always nice talking these things through.
Susan Freeman
Thank you and, uh, I will see you in what looks to be a quite rainy can next week.
Tom Sleigh
Oh thanks Susan, I didn’t know it was going to rain well we shall see. It’s lovely to talk to you. Thank you very much for having me.
Susan Freeman
Thank you so much Tom, for talking to us about your exciting plans for the City of London. I very much look forward to seeing you at MIPIM, flying the flag and promoting inward investment.
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