Grow Places
Welcome to the Grow Places podcast where we explore the virtuous circle of people growth and place.
Brought to you by Grow Places and hosted by our Founder, Tom Larsson. These short conversations with industry leaders and community figures share insights on the built environment and open up about their purpose and what drives them on a personal level.
Thank you for listening. For more information please visit our website; www.growplaces.com and connect with us @WeGrowPlaces across all social channels.
We cover topics such as real estate, property development, place, urban design, architecture, social value, sustainability, community, technology, diversity, philanthropy, landscape design, public realm, cities, urban development, people, neighbourhoods, anthropology, sociology, geography, culture, circular economy, whole life carbon, affordability, business models, innovation, impact, futurism, mindset, leadership, mentorship, wellbeing.
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Grow Places
GP 31: Every Project Needs a Good Client: with Colm Lacey of Soft Cities and NCC
Every project needs a good client, so today we hear from one!
Colm Lacey, whose deep experience being a Client on built environment projects in public housing and education for entities such as Brick By Brick, provides the insights. Colm's journey from housing development to shaping educational estates in London and beyond provides a unique lens through which we explore the concept of "soft cities" and more broadly the role of being an educated client in the built environment. Learn how cities can thrive through their activities, relationships, and energies rather than just their physical structures. Gain valuable insights into the role of an effective client in the public sector, ensuring that diverse stakeholders are represented while prioritising the ultimate users of created spaces.
Explore the intricacies of public and third-sector development, particularly when it comes to affordable housing and community-focused initiatives. Colin emphasises the importance of maintaining strong ethical foundations and fostering innovative collaborations with developers to maximise social impact. Hear firsthand experiences from the Brick by Brick development company on transforming traditional appraisal methods and creating cooperative relationships that enhance the quality and affordability of housing projects for the communities they serve.
We also navigate the evolving urban landscape of post-COVID London, where mixed-use spaces and diverse transportation options are crucial to maintaining the city's dynamism. Colm shares his vision for sustainable campus development and the importance of community-led initiatives in preserving socio-economic diversity. Tune in to understand how thoughtful urban planning and a commitment to retrofitting existing infrastructures can lead to a more sustainable, progressive, and inclusive urban environment, reflecting the ideals of a "good city".
Hello and welcome to the Grow Places podcast, where we explore the virtuous circle of people, growth and place Brought to you by Grow Places and hosted by our founder, Tom Larson.
Speaker 2:Hi Colin, how are you?
Speaker 3:Very well, thanks, tom. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:No, thank you for having me here in this absolutely amazing light tall office that you've've got surrounded by images of soft city, you were just telling me yes, that's right.
Speaker 3:yeah, bush wagner, he's a norwegian artist and he um, he did a graphic novel called soft cities, um, and there's also a, a book by jonathan roban called soft cities, from the 70s, which both of which sort of imagined urban utopias or dystopias. So I thought it was an interesting influence for the name of the company Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so urban utopias and dystopias. I'm sure we could have a long conversation about that, in a sec Maybe. Before we dive in, why don't you just give a bit of an introduction to yourself and what you're up?
Speaker 3:to now.
Speaker 3:So I'm Colin Blasey.
Speaker 3:I'm a founder and managing director of Soft Cities, also group director of capital projects for New City College, which is where we are today, and I also, in my spare time, chair the board of London CLT, which is a community-led housing organization.
Speaker 3:So all of those things keep me very busy. I guess the thing that I'm spending most of my time on at the moment actually is building new education buildings for New City College, which is fascinating and great and a wonderful sector to work in, having moved out of housing development post-break-by-break, did a lot of housing development prior to this, firstly with break-by-break and then with various local authorities on the development, regeneration housing side of local authorities over the last 20 years or so. So it's a really interesting time. It's nice to be working in education now, particularly while residential is quite quiet although hopefully there's some changes in that regard coming up soon and also really good to get to know a different sector. You know the demands, I guess, and the needs and the spatial requirements and obligations and creative capacity and a whole new set of stakeholders in the students that we work with and the staff that we work with here. So it's been a really interesting change for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, fascinating. And so what does? What does soft cities mean? What makes the city?
Speaker 3:soft. Well, on the soft cities side I mean the name itself, soft cities is. I guess the soft element of a city is everything that's not a building or a piece of built form. So it's the activities that go on in the city or the stakeholders that use the city, their day and night time users, the energy, the relationships, the connections, the feelings that go on in a cityscape, as opposed to the buildings necessarily themselves. Obviously, both are inextricably linked. In any good city, the practice itself is really a development management and urban advisory practice. But I guess the reason for the name is that I think the driving influence in all of that should be in creating spaces for those soft elements to flourish. And building is very important and architecture is very important, urban design and layout is extremely important. But ultimately we shouldn't forget I think the reason we're creating any of this is to try and enable and enable and encourage a flourishing city in an interesting city. So those soft elements are really important, even if you're not necessarily working directly with them every day.
Speaker 2:I think yeah, no, absolutely. And um, you know we're we're operating in similar spaces always a lot of overlap. You know, in our conversations historically and kind of um a lot of shared interests and values that are around around that and um, how have you kind of come to that personally in terms of your attitude towards your work and and and why this sort of um aspect of sort of soft cities and soft city making is something that personally resonates for you?
Speaker 3:Well, I feel like I've spent a lot of time as a client. You know, I think probably the short sort of dinner party version of what I do is to be a professional client and that is to represent a whole disparate set of disciplines and needs and wants and stakeholders in any professional discussion with people who do things in a built environment. So that's a really important role. I think it's a particularly important role in the public sector. It was one that I always felt the obligation of and I always felt the importance of in the public sector was how to be the best client I could be, how to get the most out of any project I could, how to get the most efficient project or spend public sector money wisely and kind of. In thinking about that there's a lot of different factors at play, there's a lot of different priorities at play and ultimately it was, I guess, a bit of shorthand really to come to the realization that the ultimate client should be the people who ultimately use the spaces that you're creating, the people who ultimately live there.
Speaker 3:A lot of my career I've been building housing and that's quite easy because you know you're creating a space for somebody to live in, you're creating a domestic space. You're creating the spaces around that building. You're doing some placemaking, you're knitting that into an existing context. Around that building. You're doing some place making, you're knitting that into an existing context. There's some quite technical elements to thinking about how that works. You know the domestic quality and environment, the external quality environment, the city itself and obviously everything else.
Speaker 3:Well, when it's not necessarily a straightforward residential development, or you're designing for particular cohorts, or you're trying to encourage a mix of uses which might not be the normal mix of uses in any scheme, or particularly now when not too many mixes of things are particularly viable, then you have to think a little bit outside the box. I find that a really useful bit of shorthand to think you know what the person I'm designing for, the person I'm clienting for, is. The is the people who ultimately use this space and it works. It works for public spaces, it works for ag infrastructure projects, it works for residential projects, it works for education projects that I'm delivering now is, you know, to always think about that kind of comfort and interest and energy and needs, I guess, of of the people that you're clienting for. So it's really important and shorthand is probably the wrong word, it's kind of the guiding principle behind most of the jobs that I've had and continue to have to this day is to think about who will ultimately use the spaces.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and I think that very much comes across in all of the entities you've been involved in. You know your passions and is that, is that something you can track back to um a point in your life where you feel like you know where there's some of those values come from for you.
Speaker 3:You know, as on a personal level, why, why you want to, um, you know, spend your time in, obviously, development and urbanism, which is clearly a passion, but doing it for that client type that you're talking about I think I think it is, I think it's in my nature to um, I guess, want to root for the underdog a little bit and want to create spaces for people who wouldn't ordinarily have the power in any um, in any kind of economic dynamic like that. It's not, that's not to say. You know, I came at this with a bleeding heart and a spirit of activism. I didn't I fell into working in regeneration and and housing and come out of other more creative things like graphic design and and I did a little bit of. I did some magazine production and event management and all sorts of different things before I started in regeneration per se. But once I did, I think you know I brought I'm from North Dublin in Dublin, which is the nicest part of Dublin, and people there have to kind of fight for what they have and fight to keep what they've already got, and I think it's necessary to bring a little bit of yourself into any job that you do. So what I brought with me, I think, was a sense of that spirit of North Dublin into my first regeneration roles over here. Obviously, there's a lot of synergy and overlap between some of the communities that we were working for in regeneration schemes and some of the estates I was working on with where I come from myself. So I always felt kind of a kinship, I guess, with the people I was delivering for, rather than necessarily some of the developers I was working with. So, yes, I think that's always been a guiding principle. I think, as I've got older and more experienced than this, I think the trick of this, or doing it well, is to try to encourage that kinship in everybody that's working on the project.
Speaker 3:It's easy to say that there's a good side and a bad side to any deal or relationship or any regeneration story. Or, you know, developers aren't bad and public sector is good because that's it's. It's not the way you know. There's a, there's a mixture and all of those parties do good and bad things and have good and bad intentions in any scheme that's deliberate. So I think if you can find a middle way through, a consistent middle way through which really focuses on the good that's going to come from any project, or the the journey podcast nowadays is called social value, isn't it? But back then it was really, um, just trying to find the heart and the core and the truth of any project that you're trying to deliver. Um, I think that's what's really important to focus on. So that hasn't changed from when I was a teenager in Dublin to whatever age I am now. I'm not willing to divulge that. So, yeah, I think it's a guiding principle.
Speaker 3:Now, I think working in the public sector and in the third sector and in affordable housing and working with the community that has it now, for example, it's a lot easier to keep that spirit with you. You know you're not necessarily driven by shareholders demands that I haven't worked for in in the private sector or for a big house builder or something like that, where we're perhaps trying to keep that. It's a slightly more difficult challenge than than in the public sector, where a lot of the people you're working with and the entities that you're working for are at least officially there to try to promote social value. So I have found it quite easy to keep that spirit alive in my career today, um, whereas others might struggle a little bit more. But I do think it's important and it's the I, I guess, at the core. I believe what's really important is to bring your own ethics into whatever job you're doing and to ensure that those ethics are are kind of completely represented in everything that you do on a daily basis yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And, um, you know, as an outsider I think that really comes across in the conversation we've had together and and the role you've taken up and and the work you've done and, um, and how do you see that, um, throughout your career is that kind of mission, if we call it that? You know those kind of set of values and then how you actually go about delivering projects. You know whether it's large portfolios of housing or the education that you have now, because, um, you know the experience working in the public sector. Um, you know, actually actually getting things done, getting things built, getting initiatives to flourish is not easy, still is it.
Speaker 3:No, no, it's not, I think. Well, we talked already about having a mind on the ultimate client, so having a mind on ultimately who's going to use your schemes is a helpful guiding principle, I think, avoiding any easy convention. I think in property development there's a lot of things that everybody takes for granted or everybody assumes from the off. You know that design will progress through the stages and it should be left to just the architects involved in a scheme Shouldn't really be questioned too much. You know that the focus of the development should be to finish stage one and then make sure you've still got your money in order and then go on to stage two and finish that and start the process of talking to planning or whatever it might be, without any level of kind of lifting the cover on that whole process and trying to pick it apart a little bit and understand whether you can make it better anywhere along the way. Um, and I think, both as a sort of true public sector client, through a lot of the work I did with local authorities, or as an out-and-out developer, as we did with Brick by Brick, I found that there was real value actually in starting to pick all of that apart, you know, rather than looking at the most obvious scheme that you might put on a site to look at six or seven others to some and others, or rather than trying to maximize the number, the amount of numbers on one side, maybe look at a couple of sites together and see which one can deliver more capacity and which one might deliver more quality in a different way. So there's real value to be had, I think, in sort of discarding the conventional rules, I guess, of appraisal or, you know, site appraisal or analysis, and sort of poking at the edges of that through every stage, from the very beginning in any project to see whether you can make it better.
Speaker 3:I think in my roles in local authorities where they were analysing other people's schemes, I always felt there was a little bit of built-in failure into that process. You know, we kind of assume as a public sector client that you've probably been taken for a ride a little bit, or assume that you know they probably can deliver more affordable housing. But we better not ask for it because if we do that might, you know, kill the whole thing off. And that's a really imperfect conversation, I think, you know, for both parties, because one thinks you well, we'll just we'll, we'll, we'll see how far we can get with only offering whatever it is 15 affordable housing and the other is sort of we don't want to push them too hard, and nowhere along the way is there any real conversation about what is the best scheme that we can deliver together here. So you know, I I didn't like that as a as a process a process. I felt like it wasn't the most rewarding way to deliver development. So I think the way I tried to deal with that in my own roles was to work together with that developer to really open up the bonnet of the scheme itself, you know, and just talk to them about every single figure in their financial appraisal. Talk to them about what their assumptions are. Look at other schemes they might have developed and see where that figure fits in there and why is it more here and why is it less there. Look at land value and examine different ways that land value could be paid. What happens if we defer it? What happens if we convert it into this way, that way, all with a view to seeing whether it can improve the ultimate scheme that you're delivering and I improve. Usually, by my perspective, that meant either delivering more affordable housing or a better scheme, a better quality scheme or more amenity space or social value in whatever way it was defined in that scheme.
Speaker 3:When we then had Brick by Brick, which was a development company in which we were able to control a huge amount of work, to actually get schemes that could actually be delivered on those sites together, it needed a huge amount of goodwill from all of the people who were involved in that program the architects and engineers and everybody else to constantly rework these schemes to try to get them to a point of viability, or to try and get a batch of schemes to a point of viability where some would be better than others, in order to kind of cross-subsidize each other. And it was a really collaborative process of lifting the bonnet or lifting the cover on all of those schemes and examining every single input into it. And that could range from anything from you know what tenure are we delivering on a certain site or what housing typology are we delivering. Maybe we focus on houses there, because the market is slightly better for three bed houses, and maybe we focus on one bed units here, so that included all of our professional teams as well as the planning department and whatever that we were working in, or it might come down to very practical things, like you know. Why are we specifying? Specifying these materials? Why am I paying 80 quid a square meter for an oak floor when I can go to oak floor land and get the same floor for 40 pounds a square meter? Why is it just because I'm a public sector client or just because I'm a developer I'm paying twice as much? Let's not do that. Let's go and get it from there. Let's phone up those guys and see if they can deliver it.
Speaker 3:Really fine-grained level examination of every single scheme to see how you can just deliver it a little bit better. And I think that's what clienting is, you know, and I think that's how you can deliver more affordable housing on schemes. That's how you can make some of these more difficult sites work. You have to put that level of investment into the process of clienting. It won't come easily to you.
Speaker 3:But equally, it's why I get a little bit frustrated when people say schemes or X sites are not viable or councils can't deliver housing of their own or the skills are not there to be able to do that.
Speaker 3:Because I think they are there. It's perhaps just by any conventional measure of the development industry that those skills are there, and the flip side of that is that all of the skills are inherent in the development community rather than the public sector. So you know, let's give it to a developer to do, because they're the experts, and of course it's exactly the same level of limitation and capacity and capability in the private sector as there is in the public sectors. They don't have all the answers and perhaps just have a slightly better infrastructure around them to try to get to where the answers might be. So that's a very long and convoluted way of saying I think perhaps the way to actually ensure that that kind of character and ethic is delivered through any scheme is by really understanding your scheme and working it to death. You know, treating every one like it's a very special scheme, as if it's something you're delivering for yourself, for your own family, to really get to the core of it and understand how you might be able to make it better yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I completely agree and I think, um that that care and that attention to detail at every stage of the project, I think is, as you say, is fundamental to creating good developments and that model that you've just described.
Speaker 2:There is not common, but in essence that is something that every private company in theory could do. Kind of you, you know, be diligent, be caring well, were there any um levers, should we say like brick by brick or in some of the other public sector areas you've talked about, that um were being pulled or could be pulled that aren't available to the, to the private sector? I'm thinking more around access to funding or land or other things, because, even doing everything you've just described, which I think is absolutely right, things still aren't really going to happen at the moment, for example, just because where the market is, whereas you know, if we think bigger, if we think about um, what the country probably needs and what maybe the direction of government is and some of those narratives, the, the why to is quite clear, but maybe the how to is maybe less so. Have you got any insights into that?
Speaker 3:yeah, I mean it's interesting. You say it's not common but it it. I agree if it's not common in the development industry but it's common in almost every other form of development. You know it would be common if you were doing if you're putting a new kitchen into your own house, or it would be coming if you're doing your own self-build. Yeah, or it would be coming if any member of that development team you know the architect, the engineer, the developer themselves, they were doing their own self-build, they would examine their own scheme into this level of detail. But for some reason, when they come to a professional project of doing it, we all forget that we should and we don't bother to do it, and that for sure.
Speaker 3:In public sector projects. You know the big lever that's there and it is a lever is typically access to funding. You know the funding is there, plus access to expertise. You know you sit beside perhaps your planning colleagues or you sit beside your building regulation colleagues or your housing colleagues and you get much quicker access to information than, let's say, an ordinary developer would. But equally, that kind of lever can turn into quite a big hammer as well.
Speaker 3:You know the politics of trying to deliver in the public sector is incredibly difficult and ultimately did for things like brick by brick, which is a shame. Things like brick by brick, which is a shame. So it's an interesting one to determine whether or not it's sort of a helper hindrance to try to deliver. In that context I mean your question about how can this current new government administration deliver more affordable homes. This is ultimately an economic exercise. The delivery of housing. Nobody's necessarily doing it for the good of their health. Builders, developers, even affordable housing providers are doing it because it makes economic sense to do so. At the moment it doesn't make economic sense to do so. It costs too much to build and there's not enough revenue coming in on the other side. So the only solution to that is for additional funding to come into the process, whether that's additional revenue, you know, or grant comes in to each of the individual schemes, or whether it's through reduction in costs by different type of regulation or assistance through the regulation process or speeding up the regulation process. It's, I think, a bit of a moot point.
Speaker 3:I think, ultimately, if you're going to deliver one and a half million homes, it needs a just fundamentally different level of investment, a different amount of investment, a different type of investment, a different speed of investment, a different flexibility of investment to be able to do anything like that scale of change. You know, it means building the contractors who are actually going to build that. It means creating the development companies who are actually going to do those developments. It means refunding an entire affordable housing sector and housing association sector. It means flouting all of the local authorities who are currently, you know, let's say, drowning or someone bobbling along the bottom. You know there's just so many huge macroeconomic things that need to happen for that to actually be able to be delivered. I'm not saying it's impossible. I think it is possible. But we all need to factor in that this is a probably the most transformative reinvestment in an entire sector that there's been ever, I would say, in that sector.
Speaker 3:And secondly, a scale of sort of public sector momentum. Uh, that's post-war, you know. It is no other way we're going to do it and we can improve our numbers slowly. We can do better than we've been doing, for sure, and I think the market will pick up and there will be a certain amount of natural market improvement. There will be a certain amount of public sector-led improvement and that will probably, you know, improve our numbers significantly, but nothing like the kind of scale that we're talking about. So either we assume that we have to do that and the project becomes what are these things that we have to actually do, and then how are we going to find the money to do those things? Or we assume that we're definitely going to fail. So let's just agree that we're going to fail and work out a more realistic target.
Speaker 3:Firstly, I think the former is the way forward. You know, let's not do this process but whereby we all wait and see how much money government can actually release to do something and then try and retrofit the strategy to that amount of money, because that's, I think, destined for failure. I think what we should be saying now is these are all the things that actually need to change at this scale and at this pace, and how are we going to use private and public sector money to be able to fund that scale of change? I think that's the conversation we should be having. So it's a difficult one.
Speaker 3:I really welcome the intent and it's actually just very refreshing and positive, and it's a big weight off my shoulders actually just to hear some people talking positively about housing delivery or delivery in general and for people who seem to be focused on people who are in genuine housing need and the focus on affordable housing is really welcome and the focus on social housing is really welcome. Housing need and the focus on affordable housing is really welcome and the focus on social housing is really welcome. So the words are right. I think the initial approach is right, which is to try to fix policy a little bit, to try and you know, just unlock it a tiny bit. But the next stages are really, really important and I don't think we should be under any illusion that this is anything but a once in a generation investment from the public sector into a sector which is basically on its knees yeah, yeah, no, that's um, that's super insightful and I agree with you absolutely that it, it.
Speaker 2:It's really refreshing the need to actually have this intent, which is, as you say, is the first step. But then you know, now it's really you know, seeing where, where that goes and um. So so back to things that we slash, we can't control. Slash, you are controlling in that sense in terms of your work day to day, um, and you know the space we're surrounded by and the work you're doing here. How does all of that, that, that that sort of experience and that that big picture translate into your day-to-day now and and the work around education?
Speaker 3:well, we're looking at creating new education spaces here. So there's a really simple clienting function there which is to create the best kind of education spaces we can. You know, I'm most particularly interested at the moment in sort of the natural principles, the biophilic principles of design, and particularly how they can be applied to education projects. I was speaking at a thing yesterday with Jerry Tate who was talking about the work that Tate Co, for example, are doing on that, which was really interesting to see. But those principles are really useful guiding principles actually for new education projects, you know. And access to light, you know, visibility of open space for classrooms, fresh air, you know really simple things, but things that we've probably forgotten a little bit about in education design and education delivery over the years.
Speaker 3:Currently, working in the further education sector the New City College is a further education group and there's a big problem with funding, you know, as there isn't many other sectors, but particularly for further education, both on the revenue side and on the capital side, there's a lack of funding to deliver the new facilities which are needed. So there's a lot of economic work necessary to try to free up enough funding for decent projects. There's some kind of finer grain. Elements of that, like further education projects, pay VAT when they couldn't or shouldn't. So you know, I think whilst in the sector would like the government to have a little look at that. So there's a couple of smaller levers that can be pulled along the way, but I guess the overarching principle of it is still to apply those same clienting principles to these projects as well, which is to focus on the people who ultimately operate from those spaces and then try to make the most of what are undoubtedly going to be limited means to deliver those types of projects. There are some larger projects which the group is also looking at, which focus on central London campuses and perhaps rethinking how those campuses are currently structured and remaster planning some of the campuses to focus on the opportunities that lie there and also to improve the educational facilities which are already there. And they're really interesting projects on larger campuses to think about how we could do that.
Speaker 3:So it's it's interesting, but I guess in the last year or so I've just been getting to know the sector a little bit more. It's a slightly different design community than the housing design community, slightly different contractor community as well. So getting to know the kind of people who do that, getting to see some projects which were really liked actually and which were done very well, I think, and then at the moment, delivering a couple of sort of projects around five million or so out in one of our um havering campuses and another of around 15 million or so also at that direction. So decent sized capital projects where there's real potential to to focus on the product itself that we're creating, both of which are retrofit projects actually, and a lot of the central london work that we're looking at are also retrofit of existing campuses.
Speaker 3:So the group has got a really really strong green strategy, really practical, focused on all the things that you would imagine around energy reduction and water reduction and waste reduction, but also on the nature of the spaces that we create, quality of spaces we create, how we can genuinely go for a retrofit forest. So it's a really nice organization to be working with and a good sort of client for me to be working with, someone who's kind of, I guess, shares my aims and sort of vision around the right kind of projects. So really enjoying it at the moment. Actually it's a nice change.
Speaker 3:Yeah yeah, breath of fresh air.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, brilliant. And what is the maybe not necessarily the future of the education sector, but I mean for the future of the organization that you're looking at with respect to its built assets?
Speaker 3:Ultimately, it's about improving the estate. There's a climate action roadmap for further education colleges which a lot of colleges, including New Sydney College, have signed up to, and that's effectively a journey from an emerging college that would be a set of colleges who haven't really thought about sustainability in any collective way before through to established. I think is the middle area, which is having much more sustainability principles and governance processes and structures and thinking embedded within the organization both within the teaching organization and the governance structures and also within the student body to, ultimately, a leading group, which is one that's really pushing the edge and being innovators in terms of sustainability. So, for New City College itself, it's keen to be a leading organization by 2025. There are some very hard targets in that, for example, reduction in energy usage and water usage of 25% by 2025, which we're on track to achieve, same with waste generation reduction of 25% by 2025 and ultimately leading to net zero by 2050. You know a nice, actually achievable target, which is nice to be working with things that we can actually do. Um, so the way the estate works, then, is is both within the kind of responsive repairs and maintenance of the estate and in terms of any new estate that we might build, that it all adds into that overall strategy to to lead towards us being a leading organization. So it's about sustainability in its broadest sense. I guess which is the right kind of buildings which are maintainable, which are efficient, which are pleasant places to be in and teach from and to learn in.
Speaker 3:But the individual moves within that over the course of time, I think, will change. It all depends on numbers. College numbers change quite a lot. Some of our colleges are growing quite rapidly. That changes from time to time. We find in inner London areas primary school numbers are changing quite a lot. Where we are in Hackney at the moment primary school numbers are reducing and that will have an effect in in time, probably on college numbers. So things change and the demographics change and the focus of different campuses will change over time. But what remains constant is this push towards a much more modern, progressive and sustainable estate as a whole. And new city college has 12 or 13 campuses dotted around the south of the country, I think for the education sector as a whole.
Speaker 3:You know, I guess the last big strategic change there's been with regards to new development in education was probably the Building Skills for the Future program, which is a long time ago now. The last anybody has heard about education in the state is that it's falling down. You know Iraq and asbestos and whatever else you know. So both of those two things are quite negative, really, with regards to the improvement of the education estate. So I think what I would look for from the new administration is a much more positive story on education too.
Speaker 3:It is also an area of the state and capital that needs reinvestment and re-looking at and some additional investment and, I guess, measures to try to enable college groups like ours to invest around the state to make them better, because it makes a big difference. I think one of the figures I saw yesterday was that the improvement in learning outcomes directly as a result of improved buildings is 16%. So people do 16% better learning from a better building than some of the educational facilities that we currently have. So it can have a significant impact and I think it's important and therefore should attract more investment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, it's important and therefore should attract more investment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, um, absolutely and um. So just to finish thing, colin, I want to circle back on something you said at the introduction around um, your studies of you know soft cities, work and this kind of utopian dystopian idea, and, um, you know everything that you've just described about your work and your ethos. Do you kind of have a feel for what I don't necessarily want to say utopian, dystopian, because it's very polarised, but what a kind of good city, good place, looks like in terms of, you know, aspirations for the work that that we're doing, and maybe counterpoints in that with, for example, the, the historic notion of soft cities and utopian dystopian, and maybe, where the similarities, differences are? Oh, that's a big question.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I like big questions um, I mean, I guess there's a very long answer and a shorter one. I guess the shorter answer for a good city is what we've been talking about for a long time. You know genuinely mixed use, day and night time uses, intensity of interaction, intensity of creativity. You know not necessarily monotony or monouse. You know not necessarily monotone or monouse, easy to get around. You know variety of transport uses, air quality is decent, et cetera, et cetera. You don't go on forever about that, but I guess we've learned a lot in let's pick London as a place.
Speaker 3:I think we've learned a lot about the city through COVID and through. Well, I think we're actually at quite a momentous time in the property market itself at the moment. Things have been quiet for a long time. Things have been hit by repeated, really quite significant shocks to the economic system of property development public safety, mortgage rates, high inflation, safety, mortgage rates, high inflation. You know these are really seismic impacts actually. So things have been quiet for a long time following a period where there was a really seismic impact, which was COVID, which saw, you know, drastic changes to the usage patterns within cities and people's attitude towards cities and people's sort of younger people's desire to live in the city or whatever else, followed by some quite knee-jerk policies. So policies, for example, around PD and policies around various ways that city develop and obviously these big seismic shifts in terms of retail patterns or whatever else. I think probably if there's one thing that I think is really important about all of that is that we shouldn't lose the, the, we shouldn't give away the space for the city to be able to reinvent itself. And I don't mean, I guess, the obvious way, that the obvious thing that people will think I'm talking about is pd. I'm not. I think PD, delivered well, actually can be a really good housing solution. I think delivered badly, it can be a really terrible one, you know.
Speaker 3:So it's not as polemic as that, but it's that I felt, particularly during COVID, that London had lost its edge a little bit. It just lost its interest as a place to be. You know it wasn't really humming. I don't mean right in the middle of COVID, you know, sort of leading up to and probably just after it wasn't a particularly interesting place to be. You know, it didn't feel culturally very interesting, it didn't feel economically very interesting, it didn't feel from a design point of view very interesting. You know, if I asked you for your favourite regeneration schemes, I bet you'd have to scratch around a little bit in your head to really determine that was a really good one. You know you can say King's Cross, that was good. After that you're kind of gone and that shouldn't be the way for a world city. You know we should be. We should have a raft of things to choose from.
Speaker 3:So I think it's really important that cities don't lose their variety and diversity and ability to reinvent themselves and ability to get a bit crap for a while and then to improve and then to go off in all sorts of different directions. And I feel that that's been absent from policymaking for a while. You know that carefulness around that has been absent from policymaking. It's been a bit knee-jerk. It's been a bit. You know what retail partners are changing. Let's repopulate high streets with housing. You know what commercial patterns are changing. Let's repopulate the commercial spaces with housing, and housing is the one thing that's inflexible, you know, with regards to the way cities need to change. So housing's really important of it.
Speaker 3:My first sort of way to do that would be to deliver all the undelivered planning consents. Someone's going to need to invest and that's going to cost a lot, but maybe just invest in delivering those, give the money necessary to deliver those, rather than inventing new bits of things that we can develop Commercial buildings, retail buildings, greenbelt they may all be important solutions in the future, but I don't think they're important solutions now. As much as delivering the things that we have already got consent for and then rethink what's important about the city. A lot of my work with London CLT, which is a community-led housing scheme which delivers preferably affordable homes for people who already live there. So the idea is that it maintains the socio-economic mixture of an area and people who live there or were born there can still continue to live there and there's these intergenerational impacts of that and a really wide range of social value improvements as a result of that.
Speaker 3:That's really important because that's what gives the place character. You know, the empty shopfront that can be used for something else that gives the place character. The office block that you know might end up having a rave there and it might be this, that and the other. That's really important for a character and that's why people choose places to live. It's because anything could happen. You know, to a certain extent, especially urban places to live. So for me, as well as all the mixture of things and making sure things function well and there's a you know, the, the he, he that there's places to work, we can get the places to work and there's places to live and whatever else, there's an element of the unknown that I think it's really important about cities and we need to try to make sure we don't draw that out when we're creating policies for urban change.
Speaker 2:Colin, thank you very much, really appreciate your time and it's really interesting to hear your perspective on such a range of experiences and topics and, yeah, really looking forward to seeing what happens next for you and the work you're doing. Thanks very much, tom.
Speaker 3:Thank you, no worries.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Grow Places podcast. For more information, visit growplacescom and follow us at. We Grow Places across all social channels. See you next time.