Me trying to look cool and young in Vietnam! Plastics is the message, but its hard to illustrate dramatically.
Monday, 11 November 2024
Plastic Pollution: You Don't Realise How Bad it is Until You're Swimming in it
Thursday, 26 September 2024
Lifting the Mood
Over 80 people crowded into the Marquis of Wellington on Tuesday 24th to talk about the draft NPPF out to consultation, with a closing date for responses later that night.
The three speakers; each for a maximum of 10 minutes were myself, Paul Brailsford (Freeths) and Grant Butterworth (Leicester City).
The ‘Golden Rule’ on Green Belt releases of 50% affordable housing, I think is too onerous. I believe this needs to be reduced to secure the housing development targets the Government hope to reach.
The greater focus on renewable energy, including the possibility of once more onshore wind farms and greater solar farms is already being seen in the decisions of the Energy Secretary Ed Milliband.
Paul focussed on housing and first of all walked us through how badly we have been performing in recent times with an average of under 190,000 built over the last 20 years. Virtually the first major policy announcement of the new Government was to do with planning and the need to transform the delivery rate of housing. (When was the last time Planning has been central to the political argument?) As well as the NPPF, there are all sorts of related announcements from introducing more application delegation; to changes to the Affordable Homes Programme; the Right to Buy; and a new generation of New Towns.
Grant largely concentrated on the local implications in Leicestershire, where the Green Belt is virtually non-existent (bad luck on Robert Galiji for winning the quiz on this subject, but left before it was my round for drinks!). The big takes for him were the restoration of strategic planning, where Leicester districts had stoutly compensated for this dearth in recent years with their non-statutory Strategic Growth Plan and a Statement of Common Ground ensuring genuine co-operation between the districts. He summarised the change in housing numbers by district, which are very substantial (albeit the previous cooperation between the Leics Districts will significantly ameliorate the impact in most cases).
Grant was obviously pleased that Planning is central to the new Government’s agenda and expects a further range of supporting initiatives from new Acts, a National Housing Strategy and National Development Management Policies to follow.
Overall, the general conclusion was that this is an extremely positive first major step to getting development moving in areas, which are essential for the greater social, economic and environmental health of the UK. While it needs the economy to grow to make it work, this is at least in part dependent on getting the amount and quality of development right. Personally, I don’t think this consultation draft needs changing much and the important thing is to get it out there, finalised asap. Tweaks can be made later. So go go go for a December launch as trailed and continue the mood of positivity for as long as possible.
Friday, 16 August 2024
Planning All Change: NPPF 2024
Tuesday, 21 May 2024
Carisbrooke Tennis win National Club League - Midlands.
Thursday, 2 May 2024
Modern Methods of Construction: Are they a Good Thing?
Simon Jones, Technical Innovation Manager of the Vistry Group, a top 1 / 2 housebuilder first of all went through the seven categories of MMC. He obviously concentrated on Categories 1 & 2 which related to 3D primary or volumetric systems and 2D primary structural systems and which Vistry are promoting from their own factories. At present these are focussed on manufacturing a closed timber frame timber product, but hope to move to adding external cladding, roofing, doors and windows (Cat 2c).
He then discussed some of the potential advantages listed above, but at the same time talked about the challenges, including payment stages, early design freezes and the need for level sites.
Edward Jezeph is responsible for encouraging offsite construction and innovation for Homes England, the Government’s housing and regeneration agency. He went through the various tools that they use to try and increase the supply of affordable, quality homes (last year 190k against a target of 300k so work to do). These include giving funding to get sites ready for development, loans, grants for affordable homes and guarantees.
Construction is a tough job with limited productivity improvements constantly lagging behind the rest of the economy with a poor safety record and a dearth of skills. One third of UK waste comes from construction with 25% of materials taken to site wasted.
As with Simon, Edward pressed the concept of offsite timber frame construction with further advantages from cost certainty, improved health and safety and greater labour force diversity. He concluded with some case examples, including the famous and impressive timber framed, Goldsmith Street, Norwich.
James Wilson, MD of Davidsons, a major regional housebuilder focussed on commercial risk in the light of companies, such as Ilke Homes, an MMC advocate, entering liquidation with £319m of debts. He talked through a case study of, for him, the inflexibility of relying on a MMC contractor supply that puts the whole project at financial risk.
For his brand that introduces a lot of design detail and variety into its product it makes the timber frame designs more complex and therefore less economic. It is also more inflexible in terms of labour requirements and therefore less cost effective, having greater peaks and troughs in the need for specialised skills such as plumbers and electricians, which is less efficient.
He is not opposed to MMC as such, being disappointed that he is building in essentially the same way as 30 years ago when he entered the profession. At the moment for him MMC is better suited to such schemes as student housing, where repetition is the key.
There then followed a lively and very civilised debate. For low rise housing there is clearly a long way to go to reap the obvious benefits of off-site production, but it should ultimately be the way to go. At present sufficient benefits will probably be restricted to say the largest 5 housebuilders with scale to work with large production runs.
Wednesday, 6 March 2024
Modern Methods of Construction: Are they a good thing?
Building parts or all of a house off site in factory conditions seems a no brainer, compared with working in what at times can be a hostile environment of weather or light, with supervision being harder for management.
Thursday, 8 February 2024
The Future of City Centres: A few thoughts
At hot topic at business forums in Leicester at the moment appears to be the future of ours and other City Centres. There are further meetings of both Leicester Business Voice and Procon at the end of February on this issue.
The conversation at present appears to be relatively negative and has been so for a few years now. Clearly, the internet has wiped out a significant proportion of the retail offer of most centres and latterly the increased trend for working for home has only added to those woes in City centres.
At a recent Friends of New Walk meeting I opined that I had visited the centre of Leicester recently on a Tuesday night and certainly on the Gallowtree Gate axis it was busy on a day I did not expect. I did remark that it was a very different demographic from myself being young and significantly of Asian background. While I was very positive about this, the aspect that made it a bit uncomfortable for me was the absolute proliferation of cycles and similar in the pedestrian areas, frequently travelling at significant speed. I did not feel relaxed and felt I had to keep my wits about me all the time.
Cllr Liz Sahu picked me up on this at the meeting by saying I had missed that it is also largely male (probably me being a male!). And of course she is right.
I think this focus on a limited demographic is a weakness, discouraging a wider range of visitors to act as customers for greater variety of businesses. If the profile is young and male it can be a more combustible environment prone to behaviours, which discourages other groups visiting when there are a limited range of people in view.
Since Covid the numbers of office workers actually in situ in the City has plummeted. Many office based businesses struggle to get their experienced employees to return citing the benefits of teaching and supporting junior staff and new starters; better collaborative working; greater management direction; and improved productivity (studies from Goldman Sachs to my small business size cite that overall there is a 25% reduction in productivity with full home working). I was very heartened to read at the end of January of an Employment Tribunal case where a senior manager at UK’s financial regulator, the FCA, was ordered back to work because of the business benefit, even though it was acknowledged that her work, as such, was satisfactory.
I was also heartened to read that Sadiq Khan, worried about the detrimental effect of the WFH movement on the London economy, was looking at ways to incentivise working in the office, like cheaper travel, on the highest days for working from home.
So, in this perfect storm of challenges for the city centres, I don’t pretend to have many answers.
Senior businesses leaders, as well as the large public organisations based in the city, need to take the lead on getting staff back to the office to both support all the secondary businesses, as well as broaden the demographic making the City more comfortable to women, older people and affluent people from outside the City who have more disposable income.
In Leicester we must continue to try and improve our transport offer as currently because of the tram and the greater public control of buses we lag behind Nottingham.
We need some way of achieving national control and enforcement of speeding and pavement riding of electric bikes / scooters.
With the changing patterns of working we need to understand how we can improve the whole office environment to make it more attractive to staff and conducive to the advantages of office working such as training, company cohesion and collaborative working.