This time last year, an in-depth community engagement exercise was just concluding in and around the Essex town of Harlow.
Over a three-month period, there were 7,000 visitors to an online platform to gather valuable data on how people felt about the quality of their lives in, and the future growth of, the town and a number of strategic development sites surrounding it.
Views were shared on everything from the joy of living right on the River Stort to concerns about dog poo and littering; from an appreciation of the area’s decent housing and good access to schools to dissatisfaction with local services and facilities.
The new town’s partnership of local authorities used tech funding from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to commission the Quality of Life Foundation to carry out social value mapping within the area and monitor the project via digital and in-person engagement. More than 1,000 residents provided comments and completed surveys, and over 500 offered individual responses. And there was one particular issue that received a lot of attention.
In January 2017 the town and the surrounding area – known collectively as Harlow and Gilston – was designated a garden town by the then Department for Communities and Local Government. This kick-started an ambitious plan for 16,000 new homes to be delivered in the area by 2033, with a further 7,000 planned from 2033 onwards. Unsurprisingly, the consultation responses reflected people’s concerns about how this bold development strategy would affect or change the area.
Creating social value
The question that such an in-depth level of community engagement threw up was this: can such a vast expansion create social value by supporting environmental, economic and social wellbeing, and in doing so improve the quality of people’s lives?
Matthew Morgan, director and co-founder of QoLF, says the earlier that community engagement happens the better, as this establishes a baseline alongside socio-economic and environmental data. “You can then start to organise your decision-making around what is needed in a place and what people are asking for,” he says.
The next steps include using the data to build action plans and help shape local development strategies. “The aim is to create greater trust and transparency, and some form of accountability,” adds Morgan. “You can also begin to measure the success of a project by its ability to deliver on what is wanted in an area, by outcomes for residents who move in and what it’s like to live there.”
This is not the only example of early community consultation on issues surrounding social impact and development. In Lewisham, south-east London, Landsec is in the early stages of designing a very different project: a masterplan to turn the ageing local shopping centre into a 13-acre mixed-use urban neighbourhood, including more than 2,000 new homes.
The existing community is already heavily involved here too as the developer strives to live up to its sustainable development strategy to “Build well, Live well, Act well”.
“Our plans for Lewisham Shopping Centre are rooted in Lewisham’s people and culture,” says Jennie Colville, Landsec’s head of ESG and sustainability. “They have been made possible by working extensively with local partners to really understand how we can add value to the community.”
In the very short term, this has meant working with established local stakeholders to create almost £1m of social value in the 2021/22 financial year. This includes £400,000 worth of space provided to charity partners, such as the Migration Museum and bike recycling shop XO Bikes, and nearly £500,000 created through Landsec’s employability partnership with Circle Collective.
Landsec’s own development teams, contractors and consultants must all deliver against a comprehensive set of environmental, social and economic sustainability metrics.
“At the heart of what we want to understand are the needs of the communities immediately around the places we’re building,” says Colville. “We want to understand in great depth their problems and how the developments we are shaping can deliver positive solutions.”
Act intentionally
These two projects highlight key lessons for the wider industry as it learns how to embed social value for the long term – well beyond procurement and delivery.
“One of those is intentionality,” says Vivienne King, head of real estate social impact at advisory business The Good Economy. “So that you have deliberately thought about it to make it happen, rather than it popping up as a consequence of what you’re doing.”
She adds: “Businesses need to create a strategy, and they need to action their strategy in the same way they would action a strategy for anything else that they consider to be business-critical.”
This means systems and methodologies. Frameworks for measurement must be put in place to build up a much better picture of what good places are and how best to deliver them.
“This is something that the Harlow and Gilston Garden Town Board are trying to mandate with housebuilder partners,” says Morgan. “It is key to what we think is a fully functioning system.”
But this approach is still far from the norm across much of the sector.
“There is a general resistance or lack of enthusiasm for post-occupancy evaluation – and that holds the industry back,” Morgan says. This is a major problem in the volume housebuilding sector because the business model of “build and disappear” simply does not require it, he says. QoLF is calling for a shift in mindset.
He highlights Urban & Civic, a client, as a developer that is committed to following the loop back to find out what works and where improvements need to be made. “They are now talking to their residents a year after they move into their homes, and then we go back every two years to see how the community infrastructure, the green infrastructure is working,” Morgan says. No one is going to get everything right first time.
The danger, Morgan adds, is that the focus on volume over quality, driven by the housing shortage, allows the private sector to continue with the status quo. For Landsec, its role as a long-term custodian of the places it builds and manages enables a different approach. Colville agrees that a wider shift in mindset is essential: “Social value should be seen as an investment, not a cost to businesses.
“It should drive the way we think and work, not simply operate as an additional workstream. By working with communities to understand what is needed and where we can add value, we will ultimately create better, more successful places in the long run.”
In different ways, Harlow and Gilston and Lewisham will test that theory. Here’s hoping that learnings will be noted and that opportunities to improve development by putting local communities at its heart will increasingly become the norm.
Jennie Colville, head of ESG and sustainability at Landsec
How do you make social value a priority rather than a box-ticking exercise?
We believe that designing our schemes thoughtfully can both maximise social impact and deliver maximum financial return for our shareholders. We see no difference in these two objectives. Aligning both objectives with clear targets and a framework to measure progress against is key. We use the National TOMs framework to measure the economic and social benefits of all our developments, allowing us to hold ourselves to account, track progress and make comparisons across projects.
Everyone who works on a development of any kind will have personal objectives and targets linked to how well we involve local communities. We are committed to establishing a local scrutiny panel for each of our developments, with members drawn from the community, local authority and, where relevant, city-wide representatives to assess and report on how successfully we are delivering against our public commitments.
How do you deliver social value in perpetuity?
We are also long-term custodians of the places we build and manage, so we have the capacity to steward and constantly improve the impact we create. The teams across our operational places work alongside their local community to continue driving value into the long term. For example, at Bluewater in Kent our team have created £1.9m in social value since 2019, over and above the intrinsic value the asset brings to the local community.
To send feedback, e-mail julia.cahill@eg.co.uk or tweet @EGJuliaC or @EGPropertyNews
