Whenever talk about levelling up intensifies, London finds itself pushed to the background. Not because no one cares about London, but because its reputation, as the place where fortunes are made and the streets are paved with gold, disguises the real London. The real London suffers from deprivation too, the real London needs investment, and real levelling up requires London to be firing on all cylinders.
At this year’s MIPIM in Cannes, EG sat down with Elizabeth Campbell, executive member for London’s future: business, economy and culture at London Councils and leader of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and architect Jack Pringle, chair of trustees at RIBA and past-RIBA president, to talk about why London must not be forgotten.
Public-private partnerships
“We need investment too,” says Campbell, explaining her presence at MIPIM. “Whatever the flavour of government, there’s probably not going to be much money coming to London authorities, so we have to get together to look for public private partnerships.”
For Campbell, London’s 32 boroughs are full of “incredibly pragmatic, practical politicians” who just want to deliver the best for their residents. And that means attracting investment so that they can deliver the infrastructure, the jobs and the homes that residents need.
“We’re looking for infrastructure which will unlock housing,” she says, citing the example of fellow council leader Anthony Okereke at Greenwich, who was at MIPIM highlighting the value of getting an extension to the Docklands Light Railway. The value? 20,000 much-needed homes.
While London’s streets most definitely are not paved with gold, there is a network of opportunities across the capital.
“As London councils, we have a map of about 160 propositions that we would like to see private investment into,” says Campbell. “We are at that point where we are ready to go, we’re united and we’re looking for partnerships.”
Agility and resilience
For Pringle, London always comes up trumps. The capital always finds a way to reinvent itself, underscoring the resilience that should keep bringing investment and investors to it.
He cites how after the 1980s “Big Bang” London became a banking town, then in 2007 when the “banks went into the sin bin” it reinvented itself as a TMT town and how, suddenly, London is now a life sciences town.
“There’s that agility to London,” he says. “Why is that? Because if you’re a top dog industry, like emerging life sciences or whatever, where do you want to go? You want to go where you can get the best brains in the world to come and work with you. And you want a world city that’s got all those cultural things that you and your family can enjoy.”
For him, London’s resilience comes from its ability to serve an ever-changing business community while delivering a cultural offer like no other.
“There’s a real imperative to make sure the culture of London goes hand-in-hand with the business opportunity of London, because they lift each other up,” he says.
But, if London is forgotten, if investment does not continue to be secured for the capital, there is a real risk of London losing those things. To ensure that it does not, Campbell and Pringle left the audience with two key asks.
Infrastructure and planning
“For me, it would be investment in infrastructure which unlocks homes,” says Campbell. “We need more homes. If you want people to come and live in London and work, they have to have a decent roof over their heads.”
For Pringle, it is about making development easier. “We need to speed up the planning process,” he says. “Planning permissions are a drag on development and they create enormous risks for inward investment. If it’s going to take two or three years to know whether you can really pay off with your investment, you have to be pretty determined to do it.”
For London not to be left behind in the levelling-up discussion the answer seems to lie with the London councils working together to showcase those 160-plus opportunities to private sector partners. Where they will have to rely on whatever flavour of government it may be, however, is providing the means to unlock infrastructure and speed up the planning system.
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