QUESTION TIME When a council cabinet member tells a developer that they should perhaps consider a different career if they don’t like the planning system, in front of a room full of real estate professionals, it is sure to get a reaction.
An audible gasp rippled through the audience at EG’s Bristol Question Time last night when Nicole Beech, cabinet member for spatial planning and city design at Bristol City Council, told Paul Isaacs, managing director of Generator South West, that he should maybe change career or consider that he was the problem if he was facing numerous planning issues in the city.
Isaacs, whose company Generator South West has faced numerous delays on projects in Bristol, including a 3.5-year delay on one scheme and 12 months on another, said the council was hampering developer’s ambitions to deliver much-needed housing in the city.
“There is too much demand and not enough supply and the planning system is not helping the process,” he said. “I have planning applications going through the system that are taking too long. We can’t build quick enough in Bristol and planning is a big part of that.”
He added: “If I had a magic wand, I would take the politics out of planning.”
Isaacs, with support from developer members of the audience, said that too often schemes were being recommended by planning officers but being thrown out by cabinet members who were focused only on winning their next vote.
“This is what the world is like,” retaliated Beech. “This is what building things in the UK looks like.”
She dismissed the claim that removing politics from planning would be a cure for Bristol’s lack of speed.
“We are that fabric of the city,” she said. “We are elected to represent the city, we are this city. We live in the city, we represent those residents, those people that when you are long gone are going to be living here and those people who are living in those houses are the new electorate. You are talking La La Land. Politics is dead central to planning. It’s either get on or get out.”
Burges Salmon partner Liz Dunn said the planning process was so difficult because of the sheer volume of different people with different interests that it involves.
“We get very bogged down in the detail and what ifs instead of let’s just move this project forward,” said Dunn.
“We are not delivering enough homes and planning probably is the root cause of that,” conceded Savills’ head of western region business development Julian Harbottle. “If you could speed up planning it would make a hell of difference.”
The panel could all agree that there needed to be more investment in and appreciation of planning departments across all local authorities.
Listen to the debate in full:
Bristol offices on the brink
Bristol is teetering on crisis level when it comes to the provision of appropriate grade-A office space and needs to get the balance right if it is to attract occupiers from outside the city.
Liz Dunn, partner at law firm Burges Salmon, said that permitted development rights allowing the conversion of offices to residential had robbed the city of secondary space and, coupled with a lack of grade-A space, meant that occupiers were having to settle for lower quality space.
“We have got to create an environment where there is quality space,” she said. “We are not far off a crisis, especially when what we are looking to do is attract people from outside the city.”
Generator South West managing director Paul Isaacs added: “The problem Bristol is facing is that the secondary office market has gone and finding a 20,000 sq ft purpose-built office is impossible and that is the kind of space that occupiers coming to Bristol want.”
Savills’ Julian Harbottle said there were currently 14 active requirements for grade-A space in the city and not enough supply.
Nurturing Bristol’s tech start-ups
Elaine McKechnie is centre director of Future Space, an innovation hub for fledging tech and science firms. At just over one year old, the space – on the UWE campus in Bristol – is 70% let and home to some of the most innovative home-grown and international businesses.
The space provides offices and labs for firms in the growth phase up to 10 to 15 people. However, McKechnie said she had witnessed a real issue for start-ups in Bristol finding space as they grew from 15 to 100 people. She said “grow-on” space was still sparse, expensive and quite risky for firms when they were still in that growth phase.
Spaces that were in demand from the young, innovative companies were the less shiny parts of Bristol, said McKechnie, such as shipping containers.
Listen to the interview in full:
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