Nigel Hugill, Chief Executive, Urban&Civic
Q. What are your views on the future of town and city centres generally?
I am actually quite optimistic. Ultimately property reflects the surrounding economic habitat. I see those broader prospects as pretty good, not least on account of the extraordinary advances in technical and lifesciences that the pandemic served to turbocharge. Moreover, whilst there has been a decline in consumer confidence there is still GBP 200bn or so of involuntary savings left over from the pandemic waiting to be spent. The better question is how to speed up change.
Q. What are your views on the Government’s Levelling up Agenda?
The unsentimental aspiration of levelling up is to make every place the best it can be. Regional disparities remain stubbornly structural and widen as the country becomes wealthier as a whole. They also shift over time. Circumstances that led Birmingham and Middlesbrough to be amongst the strongest entrepreneurial drivers of our Victorian economy are not about to be replicated. Nor should we try.
Effective policy interventions have to go with the current flow and build upon existing attributes and specialisations. They will also involve facing some hard political realities. Just as with seeking equality of income via highly aggressive redistributive taxation, attempts to eliminate regional differentials completely would only ossify our economy, not energise it.
Starting with the practical is not to ignore manifest inequities that must rightly be addressed. Northern Rail has been denied a fair share of capital investment since well before Doctor Richard Beeching’s cuts in the 1960s. Moving the DVLA to Swansea transferred jobs for sure but did nothing much for ground level wealth creation in Wales. Serious intentions towards levelling up require, as a minimum, a strategic commitment to improving value add and further investment in national rail transport, alongside better relative educational attainment across large swathes of the country, sometimes within the same county. Tough but far from impossible.
When I first moved to London, more than four decades ago, the capital contained many of the worst state secondaries in the country. Now it boasts more than its share of the best. Tony Blair, his Academy Programme and Teach First combined to deliver demonstrable improvement. The current Education Secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, is cast in that same forthright radical mould. Urban&Civic is making its own modest contribution. We recently completed a marvellous new secondary academy at Houlton. Led by an exceptional head, the new school is already oversubscribed and forging an outstanding contribution to education provision in Rugby Borough.
We have to recognise without attributing political blame that some of our regional metropolitan cities – Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool in particular – fall dramatically short against international comparators. This weighs heavily on both regional prosperity and the performance of the national economy, costing the latter close to an estimated GBP 50bn per year.
The Red Wall dictates the prevailing political direction and incremental improvements to local economies should obviously be progressed where policy has the levers to do so. Money also goes to mind set. More attention and spend to health and less on schools, which has been the way in the UK for the last 15 years, only tips the balance further away from young people and exacerbates stark intergenerational disparities that interrelate with provincial metropolitan centres. Ultimately, the real shifts have to come from improved productivity and value add from city regions outside London.
In turn, that requires sustained co-operation and mutual support. Current political configurations mean that there remain real challenges, most especially with Glasgow and Liverpool, but the pragmatic approach being taken to working with Central Government by Andy Burnham, just as much as Andy Street or Ben Houchen, provides some real grounds for optimism. Such are the timeframes involved that we have already to look to the next Parliament for any meaningful change. COVID and Ukraine have done for this one.
Q. How can large sites alleviate local planning problems in South East England?
The argument that large sites will come to account for an increasing proportion of future residential development in South East England is over for all practical purposes. Serial infill is fraught with opposition and the notion that there is sufficient brownfield land outside the M25 in areas of high demand is simply empirically and spatially disingenuous.
Publication of census data in the summer looks set to reinvigorate the debate over the extent of required housing numbers but my confident expectation is that the percentage contributed by large sites will continue to climb. Urban&Civic now has seven large residential projects in active delivery. All now enjoy higher levels of local approval than when first mooted. That has to be the acid test.
As a meticulously planned extension to the medieval town of Rugby, Urban&Civic’s Houlton settlement works at so many levels: the highest ranking new residential development in the country, according to purchasers on HomeViews; 1,600 and counting houses occupied or contracted within less than five years; a grand if redundant shortwave transmitter building, listed previously on the basis of historical importance, futureproofed by conversion into a magnificent new secondary school; one of three new primaries already undergoing scheduled expansion; medieval ridge and furrow common land respected and incorporated; the first bus lane in the borough; nine housebuilders currently on site employing modular as well as traditional construction techniques; net environmental gain targets consistently exceeded; strong crosscommunity standing reflected inwarm praise from the local MP recorded in Hansard.
A source of considerable pride to Urban&Civic of course. More than that, it is a genuinely thrilling example of joined-up Government thinking.
The UK is fundamentally overshopped. The vast majority of our population live on a small, densely populated island with an extensive road network and high home computer ownership. Internet retail was always going to hit hard. Equally Victorian market towns spawned way too many public houses for modern requirements. As societies generate more disposable income and become more leisured, so the ability to socialise and congregate is enabled. The desire never left us. We need to make places as attractive as possible, particularly to eating outside in the summer. The big nudge that the Government could give to town and city centres would be via some positive discrimination on business rates. An unintended consequence at present is for the precise opposite in favour of logistics.
Other Repurposing Real Estate Interviews
Repurposing Real Estate - The future of the world's towns and cities
Name: Nigel Hugill
Title: Chief Executive
Company: Urban&Civic
