“We are just under a quarter of the national GDP of the country, so London is a quarter of the economy. We are also the engine of growth so, London grows faster than the rest of the UK so, we’re ahead of the rest of the UK in terms of the year on year growth and so we’ve got a responsibility to ensure that we grow because we’re the engine of the, of the UK economy. So, that growth plan is not just a big piece of work for London, but it’s a big piece of work for the UK as well.”
Susan Freeman
Hi, I’m Susan Freeman. Welcome back to our PropertyShe podcast series brought to you by Mishcon de Reya in association with the London Real Estate Forum, where I get to interview some of the key influencers in the world of real estate and the built environment. Today, I am delighted to welcome Howard Dawber. Howard was appointed London Deputy Mayor for Business in December 2023. Before joining the Mayor’s team, Howard worked in business for thirty years, spending seventeen years as Managing Director for Strategy of the Canary Wharf Group. At Canary Wharf, Howard was involved in the development of the Elizabeth Line and supporting the 2012 Olympic Bid and Olympic legacy as well as commercial inward investment projects in tech, health and life sciences and financial services. He’s been an active member of business organisations including Business London, London Chamber of Commerce, The City UK and The London Property Alliance. Howard was a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party and is the Chair of Labour Friends of Bangladesh and Labour Friends of the USA. So now we’re going to hear from Howard Dawber about his role as Deputy London Mayor for Business and what he’s aiming to achieve. Howard, good morning, it’s really good to see you in, in London, obviously we last saw each other on the Opportunity London New York trip a couple of months ago and I see you’ve actually already been back to the States again, did I see pictures of you at the US Democratic Convention recently?
Howard Dawber
Yes, first of all I just say a pleasure to see you again and wonderful to be on the show. Whilst I was in New York I’ve obviously got a keen interest in American politics like a lot of British people involved in politics have because it’s, it’s similar but different enough to be really interest and a lot of things that happen in, in America can translate into the UK policy quite well so, for example, tax incremental financing came from the USA, as a property based policy. So whilst I was in New York I took the advantage of going to see the debate that was on between Biden and Trump with a whole load of Democrats from New York in a church in Harlem and that was an experience because they started very, very upbeat and by the end of the debate they were not feeling upbeat, so that was the start of the process that obviously led to a change in the candidate and I hadn’t intended to go to the Democrat Convention but there was simply so much energy and so much going on I thought I would, I was able to take a week off work and go as a busman’s holiday to, to watch it and it, you know, yeah it was a, it was an exciting week.
Susan Freeman
So you’ve mentioned TIFs and we will get back to TIFs later in the conversation but any lessons for UK politics from that convention?
Howard Dawber
I think so, I think the, there’s a different attitude to politics and clearly one of the messages that the Democrats were trying to get across in their convention was about joy and positivity and talking America up and to counter this idea that the past was better and somehow going back to a, a previous version of America would be better than going forward to a new version of America and this is effectively the fundamental debate that all western countries are now having. Are our best days behind us? Do we want to reverse some of the processes of technological change and globalisation and the climate change agenda? Do we want to go back to something perhaps a simpler existence of an easier to understand existence or do we want to push forward into something new and push for innovation and change and embrace globalisation which would include then embracing for example, people migrating across the world and you know a change in your personal circumstances, potentially. So, there’s that whole sense of excitement and positivity and it’s a cliche but I find that American businesspeople tend to start meetings with a positive vision of where they want to get to and a sense of determination and a can-do attitude rather than skirting around the issue and then listing a number of objections or obstacles to be jumped over and it’s the same in politics so that I think the lesson is, sometimes you’ve just got to go for it and don’t hang around waiting for the circumstances to be right. Joe Biden stood down from the Democrat candidacy 29 days before the Convention and Kamala became the candidate effectively about three or four days later, so it was only three weeks between her becoming the nominee and the Convention, they had to put the whole of the content together for her, it was a totally different event, in three weeks so there was an enormous amount of adrenaline in the room because they, they were running to catch up and so that was very energising.
Susan Freeman
Okay, so there are some lessons there. Interesting point about whether we look forward or look back but I suppose it’s going to be a combination, take the best of what we’ve had and the best of what’s available going forward.
Howard Dawber
Yeah, no I’m, I’m a great believer in, it’s actually a drawing that that Michael Squire used to do when he was explaining his philosophy of architecture was a tree and he said, you know, “We’re building the tree but we need to understand the roots” so you base your designs and your plans on what’s gone before but you’re creating something new out of the foundations of what was there before. He was you know well renowned for using old materials, using lots of brick, for using stone, for creating buildings that actually planners loved them because they fitted in nicely to the environment usually in which they were being built, they weren’t overpowering but they were definitively new buildings but using old materials and some old techniques and you know I appreciate that, sometimes you have to do something radically new but often you need to understand the context, the background and all the work that’s gone before and I think sometimes you, there’s a tendency to say let’s, let’s announce something new, I mean particularly in politics, you know the press release announce saying we’re going to do something new and completely different is a very attractive proposition and sometimes actually what you want to do is say we’re going to actually keep doing the thing we’ve been doing and just do more of it because it’s the right thing to do and we’re going to carry on.
Susan Freeman
And it’s often not as newsworthy is it, people want to say that they’re doing something new.
Howard Dawber
It’s not but sometimes, I’ll give a specific example, I’ve been involved in business in London for thirty years and in that time there’ve been three different small business support services across, across the UK and across the capital and what happens is there’s a one-stop shop for businesses to get good advice on training, growth, on finance, on exporting and the Government will fund it and then it will be run for a bit and then it’ll get shut down, it’ll lose the funding for some reason and it’ll get shut down and then a couple of years later somebody will say you know what will be really useful is a one-stop shop for small businesses to help you get advice on training and funding and stuff and then they set a new one up and then that runs for a bit and then that shuts down. We’ve just set our third one up which is Grow London Local and it is starting to have a really good impact. It’s been running now about a year, it ran in shadow form for a few months and it formally launched towards the end of last year. Now what I want to do is make sure that just stays in place so that in five, ten years’ time, people when they’re talking to each other you know about business, they say oh do you know what when I needed some advice on training, Grow London Local were really helpful, so that you get that, you get that reputation for being a good source of information and advice and you don’t have the stop-start of having to reinvent the whole process again. Another lesson from New York is if you go to the Small Business Services Department of New York City Council, that’s been obviously running for decades, it’s a big institution with a huge office that they own, with a commissioner and no matter who the mayor is, you know the commissioners come and go but the institution and the service stays and I think there’s real value in that of having some institutions in, in London our mayoral system is only 25 years old because obviously we had a London County Council system, Greater London Council up until 1986 then it was abolished, we had no strategic London authority and then we’re really quite new in terms of world cities, in terms of the structure of our Government so, New York, Chicago they’ve had mayors in place for over a hundred years and of course they’re based in huge you know palatial buildings that they own, along with lots of other stuff that they own as well and all these institutions and these programmes they’ve built up over a long, a long time, we are effectively building all this from scratch and we are, we’re very much a new, a new institution and a growing organisation so there’s lessons to be learned there I think.
Susan Freeman
Yes, I actually hadn’t thought about it like that so that, that certainly puts it into context. So let’s talk about your, your role. You were appointed Deputy Mayor for Business in December 2003… 2003… 2023 so…
Howard Dawber
It seems like a long time but it’s only eight months, yeah. No, nine months, yeah.
Susan Freeman
Are you able to tell us what in a nutshell is the role that you’ve taken on because I know it’s very all-encompassing so, how would you describe it?
Howard Dawber
It’s got to be one of the best jobs in the world. I am speaking on behalf of the Mayor to the business community of London and obviously representing the business community of London in City Hall so, you know London I believe is the greatest city in the world, we could argue we are the Number 1 city in the world, we’re certainly in competition for that, that title, you know certainly legally, in the insurance world, in financial and business services, in creative sector, in technology, in life sciences, we’re right up there, certainly competing with New York for that title of “What’s the Number 1 city?” and a lot of that is driven by our fantastic economy, our wonderful businesses ranging from obviously you know the global multinationals that are headquartered here through to the small businesses that make up 99% of the all the businesses in London and actually employ more than half of the people as well so, there’s actually a million small businesses registered in London, although we reckon about 400,000 of them are actually actively, so it’s a, it’s a huge privilege. My job is Business Engagement so, so to talk to businesses about all the things that the Mayor is doing and to feed back where we could do mor things, where we could do things better across the whole of the Mayor’s policy agenda. I’ve actually got the Skills Portfolio as well, which I took on after the Mayoral election in May, so that’s all adult skills in London, that’s more than £300 million budget each year, so it’s a big chunk of our spend and it covers all vocational education, apprenticeships and it’s a large source of the funding for further education colleges across the capital but since the election in May and particularly since the election, the national election in July, my focus has been on producing the growth plan for London. So the Mayor in his manifesto said he would produce and exciting and new growth plan for London with a focus on and a target of creating 150,000 new, good jobs for the capital, additional jobs for the capital, and that has expanded now to work with the Government on their national industrial strategy within which London’s growth plan will be a big piece. We are just under a quarter of the national GDP of the country, so London is a quarter of the economy. We are also the engine of growth so London grows faster than the rest of the UK, so we’re ahead of the rest of the UK in terms of the year on year growth and so we’ve got a responsibility to ensure that we grow because we’re the engine of the, of the UK economy so that growth plan is not just a big piece of work for London but it’s a big piece of work for the UK as well.
Susan Freeman
When do you expect to have that growth plan?
Howard Dawber
Well, we have a draft which I can’t share with you I’m afraid but we’ve got a draft and we’re already pretty happy with where we are. Our intention is that the full plan will be published in December. In the meantime, there is a document that will come out next week called Road to the Growth Plan which is a map of basically the contents of where we want to go, the questions we’re still asking people and that will be published alongside London Council so it’s a joint, the whole growth plan is a joint plan between the Mayor’s office and London Councils and that will be published at the London Partnership Board which happens next week. The actual plan will be published in December and in the meantime we’ve put in some of our main asks of the new Government to them, at their request, alongside the other mayoral authorities around the country, so those will feed into what happens in the Budget on the 30 October and the spending review that happens after that as well as the Devolution Bill that the Government has promised to bring to Parliament so, there’s a lot of moving pieces going on a the same time. Honestly, I’d hoped to spend the summer somewhere warm, drinking a nice cold drink and thinking great thoughts and assimilating lots of input and drafting the plan but the Government, the previous Government calling the election early has meant every sped up. So again, there’s a lot of adrenaline in Central Government right now, there’s a lot of enthusiastic activity and they’re certainly pushing to get some of the early wins, the low hanging fruit, within the whole of the UK in terms of pushing for growth to get some of those announced and moving by the end of October so, that’s quite exciting.
Susan Freeman
It is exciting and I mean is there an opportunity now with a Labour Mayor, Labour London Council, a Labour Government to actually tackle issues that you know we haven’t made much progress on like fiscal devolution for London for instance?
Howard Dawber
I think there is, yes, and you know I always say I don’t want to make a political point but inevitably it is. I’m sorry to say and I had so many good friends, obviously working at Canary Wharf for twenty years, you know I had to work with the previous Mayor, in fact the previous Mayor appointed me to the Board of London Partners, I’ve had to work with the previous Mayor, had to work with Central Government and I know there are good people trying to do a good job in the previous Government but it had an anti-London attitude and I don’t think this was what George Osborne originally intended, I don’t think for a minute he thought that Levelling Up meant doing London down but once George had set up that policy and then gone, what was remained was this sort of attitude that we need to promote the rest of the country at the expense of London and certainly, for example, you know London’s been knocking on the door of Central Government for support for Transport for London for example, more support for the Police, for more devolution in terms of control of local rail services, for more flexibility in the powers that we already have really without getting any, any joy at all and certainly there’s been a sense that up until July, the Government was not just not supporting London but kind of actively working against it and you know I was born in Manchester so I’ve always had a very strong view that you know we need to support and promote our regions and allow them to grow organically in the way that they really can, so I understand the need for regional development but it has to be an and, it’s not an either or and I’ll give one example and I’ve said this publicly before but it just really, it outraged me really. So I was talking to the trade team in New York who were great people, really, really good people working for the Department of Business and Trade and they said that they’d basically been told not to support London businesses. So if you’re a London business and you’d gone to New York and said right we want to expand across the US, can you help, they’d say well not really, you know we can do a bit but our focus is on business from outside London so we’re going to prioritise them. And probably worse, the other way, if you’d been a US business and said we’re looking at setting up an office in the UK and we want to go to London, they would have literally said have you thought about somewhere else because if you want to do London, we can’t really support you. Now that’s not right and they know it’s not right and I think like I said going back to the original Levelling Up policy, I don’t think that was what was intended at all and it’s just how that Government had got a bit out of control and a bit dogmatic about things. Now all of those things have now completely changed, so the attitude to London is now no we like London, London is part of the story, we want to see London grow and we’re going to support London and just that change of attitude without any cheques being written or any policies being formally changed or new legislation is already making a big difference and we really look forward to seeing what we can do together, like you said with majority Labour councils in London and with a Government that is not just of the same political party but you know there are a lot of, a lot of our friends in there, three of our ex-mayors are ministers in the new Government, there’s 43 former London councillors in Parliament and so it, it’s a Government that really does understand London without, to be honest, being London centric so I think the next five years are an opportunity that comes around sort of once in a generation.
Susan Freeman
That’s really good news and I mean the position of London on the world stage was really underlined when we were in New York because everywhere in New York you see these flags saying, “Number 1 City” and a lot of the meetings that we had on the Opportunity London trip, you know we were sort of joking a bit, well no, you know London’s the number one city but London’s up there and should be supported so that’s really good news. Now, as you just alluded to, you were at Canary Wharf Group for many years so have a background in real estate and I appreciate that real estate is just one of the business sectors that you are going to be looking after but can we focus a little bit on what the key challenges are for real estate that you’re going to be looking at because a lot of the opportunities in London are regeneration opportunities which involved real estate. What are you going to be focusing on?
Howard Dawber
Well the first thing I’d say is that as you may have seen, when we put together the manifesto for the Mayoral election in May, we listed real estate as a sector in its own right, not as a means to an end which is I think where it’s always been parked, you know the real estate industry, the built environment industry will deliver us you know more houses and will just create the space that we need for our business to grow. It’s a sector London’s really good at, it represents you know tens of thousands of people in everything from architecture to facilities management to the retro fitting, the green economy, the green tech, property technology, it’s a huge sector and it, it is absolutely vital to the delivery of everything else we want to do. I think we need to be much better about celebrating the sector. The joke I always, I always make is that growing up in the 1980s, you’re far too young to remember of course, but growing up in the 1980s there were all these TV shows like The A Team and The Equaliser and there was never a hero property developer, the property developers were always evil people sort of trying to destroy the family farm to just make money and of course that attitude does pervade a little bit through society that mm, the sort of estate agents and construction people and property people are somehow not as worthy as doctors and lawyers and accountants and management consultants, so I say absolutely not, some of our best brains, some of our best businesses and some of the greatest innovations come out of the real estate sector, so I want to see the real estate sector have absolute parity with our friends at McKinsey and our friends at let’s say Mishcon de Reya and other, other businesses that people really look up to because they really are you know some of the people I’ve worked with in the sector are just so inspiring and are driven by making a really good product that not only delivers you know the profit and the, and the return that they want to see but also genuinely makes a positive contribution to the environment, to the city as a whole, so we should be really celebrating our sector, celebrating it as something that people would want to aspire to go into, again seeing the US, you know they elected a property guy as president, now you might not like him but one of the reasons he’s there is because people look up to him, people look up to him and people looked up to him in his TV show, they’ve got a totally different attitude that property is part of the commanding heights of the economy and the captains of industry and they’re very positive about it. So let’s be really, really positive about the sector. We’re going to give the sector some challenges, clearly the transition to Net Zero is a huge challenge, there will come a point where quite a lot of our current office stock is unlettable by 2030 so there’s a huge amount of retrofit, redevelopment, bit of demolition actually, and rebuild to do there. If we’re going to meet our housing target then that’s a real challenge for the industry to find the ways in which we can make that happen and obviously we’ll be, my colleague Tom Copley and the Mayor and I will be looking at how we can do that, including some of our own land and there’s an ongoing question about what role we should play at London level, at Mayor level, as whether there is more intervention that we could do, you know, going back to the GLC days, they built and owned a lot of housing, you know, is there a direct role for us there? We already have a property company called Places for London, which owns a lot of the TfL land and the arches that TfL own, you know so we have vehicles where we could actually get involved directly so the growth that we want to see is going to require all of us to work together but there’s a huge role for the property sector there and there’s opportunities too, you know, if we are going to be the tech driven, data and AI driven life science economy we want to see, then we are going to need to deliver these 7 million square feet of lab space that’s on the books, which I’m really pleased to see, whether we want to see by 2030, we’re going to have deliver a lot of data centres and we’re going to need to build you know tens of thousands of houses every year as well as then the infrastructure we’re looking at, you know we want to put the, bring the Bakerloo Line extension back to the front burner and get that started. We want to be building more power infrastructure in London because you know we don’t have the power capacity we’re going to need to build the London we want to see you know ten years from now so, there’s a huge opportunity in the sector and we want to, we want to work with the sector but really also champion it as something we want our young people to go into whether that’s construction where we’ve got you know real shortages of construction skills or indeed development where I’d like to see more diversity in property companies, obviously you know the them of this podcast actually, if you go to some of the big property events, I mean MIPIM for example, it’s not a cross-section of society and that means we, there’s talent out there and potential out there that we are not tapping into. I’d say it’s certainly not that, that different but you would certainly see a lot more black people at a US property conference for example and there’s a lot more very Xi innovative, black owned businesses in the property sector. I’d like to see a lot more of that here, I’d like to see a lot more women in senior roles and part of that is about making it an attractive and aspirational career for people to go into and just actually telling people what the jobs are. I’m sorry it’s a long answer to the question but my old joke is if you stand in a room of, of teenagers in a school and say right, who wants to be a quantity surveyor? Not many people are going to put their hands up because people just don’t know what, what those sort of careers are and what, the qualifications you might need to get them but also the rewards that you might get from that sort of career so we need to sell the industry, we need to encourage particularly on the skills side and the construction side, encourage more young people into the sector and then I think we’ve got a great collaboration ahead of us where, you know we’re going to build a new London together.
Susan Freeman
I’m very pleased to hear you say that, Howard because the number of times on this podcast that we, you know we talk about the image that the property sector has and what we haven’t really come up with is the answer to how you get these very positive messages across, how you, you tell people because it’s such an exciting story, as you say and those of us that are involved in real estate are very positive about it but I mean who are the sort of ambassadors who should be out there telling the stories and you know making sure that people know what, I mean there’s such a diversity of roles that you can have in real estate so, you know that’s the other and most people who are not involved in real estate you know you mention real estate, you know they talk to you about estate agents so, what do we need to do, what aren’t we getting right?
Howard Dawber
I think there’s you know a lot of sectors have been through this same sort of trajectory, you know the Law was a few years ago and I actually, gosh quite a long time ago now, I’m going to say 25, 26 years ago I actually worked at the Press and Public Affairs team for the Bar Council and we were going through this because the Bar had been seen as pretty monocultural actually and in lots of ways it had become more monocultural because prior to the ‘70s you could actually get to become a barrister without having gone to university so you did your apprenticeship effectively through the Inns of Court literally and then you did a pupillage and you ended up becoming a barrister so it was actually at one point a little bit easier for working class entrants to the Bar to get through to becoming a, a barrister and a QC or a KC and with the change so that you really did need to have a degree, either a Law degree or a Law conversion, that started to actually block out some people from less well off backgrounds and it became a little bit more monocultural so the Bar went through a big effort to say right we, we need to change and part of that is about you know helping people onto the ladder, part of it is about education and outreach and then it’s about identifying the champions who are from what we call underserved communities, whether that’s women, whether that’s black people, minorities, people from minority communities, disabled people, blind people, to say right here is somebody who has gone through it and made it. People who’ve come from a less traditional route as well, so come sideways in and then also showcasing the, the breadth of different jobs there are, like you said in built environment, you know there are hundreds of different roles. I’ve worked in the property sector for twenty years, well actually I was going to say I’d never sold a building or a flat but I have actually sold buildings and flats as it happens but I’ve never carried bricks on a construction site, you know, there’s lots of things that people associate with property that are just never something I would get into and nor would you have wanted me to, you know I don’t stand around in a hard hat with rolled up plans because that needs to be somebody who really knows what they’re doing in the engineering side so I think we need to be really, really positive about the sector, champion the people who have got into the sector from some of those communities that we would like to target and then we all need to be ambassadors for it, you know whether we’re directly working in the sector or like me now sort of transitioning into politics and talk it up and say these are the people who are the builders, the words of George Osborne, these are the people who are building all the homes, the entertainment places, the restaurants, the workplaces, the hospitals of the future and that’s a really good thing. I’ve said we’re making the new city and renewing the old city and that’s going to be really positive. But just end by saying I think one of the things because there’s such a big focus now on the environmental performance of the built environment, I think that can be a way to reach out to the next generation and say look, if this is going to work, we need your help, we need you to come and help take part in this because this is going to be the thing that is actually going to move the dial on climate change more than any other sector so yes it’s, it’s great all the other green things but actually this is where the meat of the, of the problem is and the opportunity for the solution so please come and help. And I think there’s a, like I said there’s a bit of a submission there that we can frame it as a campaign of change and also give people that sense that they’ve got a bit of ownership of the changes that are happening around them physically as well, so just reaching out to people. I would say to property companies listening, it is down to all of us to inspire the next generation and part of that is when you are building something, make sure you bring in the kids, talk to the kids, get their opinions, talk to them about the jobs that are available, bring them onto site, tour round, talk to local schools, make sure you, if the kids are walking past a building site a building site every day they actually know what’s going on in there and obviously we do that from a safety point of view to try and sort of tell them not to come in and play with the machines but let’s also invite them in to come and play with the machines in a safe way.
Susan Freeman
That’s very interesting actually because I’ve been involved in a number of discussions about how we can you know get the messages out and one of the suggestions was having open days on site, so obviously done safely so people are invited in to see what’s going on, how it works and so I think it’s a good idea. I think you’re going to be a very important part of this campaign and mission because you have obviously a vast audience and the trouble with most property people is it’s a bit of an echo chamber and we, you know we all feel that way and we tend to be talking to, to each other so, let’s focus a little bit on the challenges, obviously you’ve outlined the ambition, what needs to be done and public private partnerships are going to be a very important part of this because they private sector is going to need to come in and fund some of this but can’t do it you know without working with the public sector so I just wondered you know what thoughts you had on how we can do better with those partnerships to you know help with some of the largescale urban developments, I mean obviously Euston is one of them and you, you talked very early on about TIFs and obviously finding a funding mechanism you know to help pay for some of these projects.
Howard Dawber
Yeah well I could point you to a very, very well written pamphlet which is available online on the ResPublica think tank website called Financing for Growth published in 2012, written by me on how property can help fund different bits of infrastructure but pretty much every, I mean, you know joking aside, that was based on our experience at Canary Wharf where we proposed actually what I call an elegant mechanism of land value capture to help fund the Crossrail project because our view at the time rightly was eventually the Government is going to come and ask us for a cheque and we’d already been through that so we wrote, when I was at Canary Wharf we wrote a cheque for the DLR, so we wrote a £125 million cheque for the DLR, we then wrote a £400 million cheque for the Jubilee Line, although we actually got a contract with the Jubilee Line that it had to run a particular level of service so there was a contractual relationship there, it was still a cheque and we had limited input into the design of the line or the station but there was a contract so there was a, it was a two-way relationship, it wasn’t just a here’s your money, you know, do what you want with it. With Crossrail, we were like well we’re not going to do that again because first of all, what the Government would have asked us for is a cheque for £1 billion which just wasn’t feasible but we did two deals, the first was to say look we’ll build the station and we’ll build it at zero cost to the Government, they didn’t in fact go for that in the end because they wanted to have some skin in the game but we still be able to donate £100 million discount to what they expected to pay for it because we promised to deliver it on time and on budget but for a fixed fee which was half the price that they’d expected to pay for the station and there were all sorts of good reasons for us to do that. The other side of that deal was of course to say well if we’re going to do that we want to build on top of it so we, we got agreement to build 150,000 square feet of retail on top, the retail actually opened before the trains came and has done very well and you know obviously that offset the cost of us building a station but why could we build that station at half the cost of what the Government was expecting to pay? Was it a we weren’t trying to make a profit out of it? And every other contractor that builds something for the Government is trying to make their profit out of that contract. Our deal was no, we’re going to make the profit in the rest of the estate, we just want the station to exist but we’re not trying to gouge the Government for extra management fees and the change fees and all the other things that you would normally do on a Government contract because we just want this built as fast and as efficiently as possible and I have to say, and I would say this wouldn’t I but I think that’s, it’s probably the most beautiful railway station on the planet, it’s got a beautiful garden which is now twinned with the Eden Project on the roof, it’s got a wooden roof, there’s all sorts of great things about that station but the most amazing thing is that we’ve saved the Government £100 million and in the end it actually was built in a very efficient way and it didn’t cost the Canary Wharf Group as much as they had originally expected it to cost so it’s a very good example of when you get all the incentives lined up, a public-private partnership can really work. The other part of the Crossrail project was that we called for a land value capture mechanism to capture the value of land that increased off the back of the line being built and Treasury couldn’t really be persuaded to do that even though you would have thought here’s a new tax that you don’t currently get that is extra to all the other taxes you get would be quite an attractive thing for the Treasury and that’s an ongoing discussion that I’m now having wearing my new hat. We’ll come back to that at some future point but the other bit was what ended up as Mayoral Community Infrastructure Levy which is sort of hypothecated around the Crossrail line so, the areas that are served by Crossrail pay a slightly higher rate and effectively that’s the CAZ and the north or the Isle of Dogs and the outer London boroughs pay a lower rate and that captures, it captures value but at the point of development so if you’re not developing your land but your land increases in value, that’s not recaptured by any tax so you still get a free ride. So having got some of those principles in there plus as you know we’ve got one big TIF operating in London on the Battersea Power Station line which has proved to be very good. But I have to be careful what I say here because we’re having an ongoing discussion with Government about what we might do but you know there’s a lot of money out there left on the table. If you look at TIFs in the USA most of them are funded off sales taxes, so let’s take a for example, if you, if you took an out of town location like let’s say somewhere I know quite well, Bexley Heath High Street, and you said right we’re going to run Crossrail out to Bexley Heath High Street, we’re going to put a Crossrail station right in the middle of that high street, the value of the property on that high street is going to go up, you can capture that through maybe business rates but you could capture it, a bit of it if there’s any redevelopment through MCIL, you ought to look at some sort of land value capture on the ownership but the biggest single increase in tax is going to be VAT because if footfall goes up, people spend more money, VAT 20% of the spend goes up as well and in terms of actual money, it’s the VAT there which is going to end up being the big chunk of extra potential tax for the Government. Now at the moment all that just goes to Treasury. If there were ways to capture some of that and feed it back into the infrastructure, which is like I said how most US TIFs work, you know some of them are business rates, sort of business taxes, occupational taxes but a lot of them are on sales taxes because in the US sales taxes are captured at a city of state level rather than a federal level, so it’s a tax that a city or state already has. Instantly they can also vary those taxes so they can create areas that have got lower taxes which we can’t do in the UK because all of that tax power sits with central Government so I will be and am encouraging the Government to look at all sorts of ways in which we can capture the proceeds of growth over a relatively short period to then help fund the infrastructure that delivers growth. Once that infrastructure is paid for that’s just then extra tax for the Treasury on an ongoing basis which is good for all of us because you know we need to increase the tax take to be able to pay for things that we want to do and that is the fundamental thing the Government’s doing with making growth its, its core mission so I think there’s a whole conversation that we need to have about some innovation and try some pilot things where we can look at different ways of funding TIFs and other forms of capturing value that’s created out of, out of infrastructure investment. But that’s not necessarily, I should caveat all of this by saying this is not necessarily the settled position or the policy of the Mayor and the Greater London Authority and all such ideas are subject to negotiation with the Government but I think, yeah we should definitely be looking at some of these things because if you’re leaving money on the table that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get that just seems to me to be a bit foolish.
Susan Freeman
Okay so, from what you’re saying it’s too early to say you know what we might be able to do around Euston you know for instance where you know it’s a big infrastructure project, there’s a big hole in the ground at the moment around Euston Station and everybody’s saying well what’s going to happen.
Howard Dawber
Yeah, it’s too early to say but what I would say is that for me Euston is the number one opportunity in London, it’s a potentially huge site, it’s got the Knowledge Quarter alongside to it, it would be a phenomenal place for labs and life science businesses as well as you know a significant location for new housing, it’s already got all that railway infrastructure there. If HS2 does go all the way to Euston that’s another piece of infrastructure and then long term we need to go back and look at, we certainly should leave space for Crossrail 2 or a form of Crossrail 2 and long term we need to look at yeah additional London level regional infrastructure in there as well because you know if HS2 is built to its full capacity there won’t be enough Tube capacity to manage those people so, long term that is I think going to be an absolutely crucial part of our infrastructure and you’re right, the current state of it is not, is not ideal, we need to get some positions fairly early on, what happens with HS2 and then to move forward with hopefully some quick wins at Euston but also a plan that really gets the maximum benefit there for the whole of London and also for local people in Camden. I’ve got lots of friends who have businesses on Drummond Street from Bangladeshi community and that’s been stuck really during this development and we really need to make sure that the things get moving so that we can reopen those routes across the station and make it permeable and not how it is at the moment where there’s a lot of, a lot of barriers.
Susan Freeman
I hope so too and I drive through there sort of almost every day and you do wonder so we will watch that space. So well we haven’t actually talked about Opportunity London, we talked about the fact that we were in New York on the, on an Opportunity London study trip but it really seems to have taken off with Jace Tyrrell running it and has taken on a sort of role for instance at MIPIM where it’s very much part of the London stand and you mentioned MIPIM earlier. Will you be going to MIPIM soon to fly the flag?
Howard Dawber
We’ll see. Obviously as we are paid by taxpayers and our costs are covered by taxpayers to go to these sort of conferences and we want to be efficient in terms of how we use the, the space so this year was the first time I’d not been to MIPIM for quite a while because Jules obviously, my colleague on the planning side, Jules is our representative to the property sector so Jules, Jules goes, so let’s see, let’s see who, who goes to the next one, I’ll be at UKREiiF so I’m going to be doing a couple of things there and I’m going to be at the London Real Estate Forum so let’s see. We’re making the case for a strong, the strongest possible representation. The great thing is that I mean that’s part of the point of Opportunity London is that it’s partly in fact substantially private sector sponsored and that means that whereas before if you were from, and you know this literally happened, if you’re from Lambeth and you’d got a really good project and big project that you want to promote and you go, you know maybe the Leader of the Council and a couple of officers to, to something like MIPIM, unfortunately and I don’t think this happens so much in other countries, you can get loads of criticism locally for you know ooh my goodness, you know, we, ah we’ve got potholes on our street and our Leader of our Council has swanned off to the south of France for a, a jolly with all these property people and you know it’s outrageous and of course it isn’t outrageous, it’s part of their job, they wouldn’t be going otherwise, they’ve got a big project to sell and it’s important to engage with the potential investors. Opportunity London gives us as London a chance to package up some of those projects, promote them as an organisation which is dedicated to that job to support local authorities in bringing inward investment without them facing the, the sort of criticism they’re going to get as individual boroughs or individual politicians you know going off around the world to promote things and also provide that, that resource of expertise in how you promote and who you promote to, pulling together the investors to talk to multiple boroughs and multiple opportunities at the same time so it’s a really, really good idea. I’m not going to claim any credit for it but I was involved in some of the discussions about it in the early days because we at Canary Wharf had a really good relationship with Lambeth for example, where we promoting the South Bank Place project and we really want to see Lambeth talking up the other things around that area that they, they might get investment into at MIPIM but Lambeth Councillors and officers you know obviously felt very constrained in being able to go to something like that and it sort of wouldn’t have been appropriate for one developer to pay for them to go because then they get criticism for oh now you’ve taken, you know you’ve taken a bung from a specific developer so, creating a structure where we could sell London in a responsible and effective way was long overdue and I think it’s a really fantastic organisation and particularly we couldn’t have got a person to run it than Jace Tyrrell. It was a one man promotional machine, he has hit the ground running, I should say obviously he’s got a good team but he himself is a, is a phenomenon and I’m pleased to be part of effectively a quartet of promoters of London alongside obviously Sadiq himself who is a brilliant advocate for the city and for investment in London, Laura Citron of London and Partners who is you know we’re very, very lucky to have her running our promotional agency. Jace at Opportunity London, I’m very much the fourth among equals there as an additional support to them but it’s a good team and I’m not just saying that because it’s the team we have right now, it really is a good team of people and you know we, we coordinate really well. I should also say something about London Councils, I’m working very closely with Mayor Jason Perry of Croydon, the Conservative Leader on London Councils and the Executive Member for Economic Development and so we’re working very closely on the growth plan so it’s one of those times, you know the Government’s going to be in for five years probably, we’re going to be in for four years, the councils don’t have elections for a couple of years, now is the time for everybody to say let’s put politics to one side and let’s all work together on the stuff that we, you know, we all agree on in terms of getting London growing.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, I’m a great supporter of Opportunity London and it is really good to see public and private sector coming together to promote London and I have interviewed Laura and Jace on this podcast so I know exactly what you mean. So at the end of your term, what will you hope to have achieved because you’ve got a few years and there’s an awful lot to do. What are the key things?
Howard Dawber
I think there’s three things I’d like to achieve. I’d like to see a real renaissance in the small business community of London who’ve had a rough time. I’m going to say high streets, I’d like to see a, a coherent plan for our high streets which is what we’re working on now partly through the growth plan, partly probably through a deep dive into high streets after the growth plan as well but I’d like to see the high streets really thriving and that means they’ll have to change. There will have to be some change and some changes of use and changes of activity. I’d like to see that happen during this term so that we can, we’ve got high streets that have reinvented themselves for the, for the next ten to twenty years because high streets are hugely important not just for the shops and not just as a place for people to go and the centres of the local community but they’re economically very important because of the little offices above the shops, the little sheds at the back of the shops where people you know start their little manufacturing businesses and the where the post offices are, they’re where the offices are that people go to get you know their life admin whether that’s banks, the council representative offices so high streets play multiple, very important roles and they are, they are an anchor, an economic anchor for a lot of our communities so I’d like to see that happen. Like I say I’d like to see a new energy in our small business community and really helping small businesses to engage with big buyers, including getting more contracts from the public sector and we’ve got a real role to play there but also to see that small business advice service bed down to a point where you know if you are running a microbusiness or a small business or a medium-sized business in London you know that we’ve got your back and that the Government’s on your side, at least our bit of the Government is and hopefully the rest of the Government too but that is not what people feel at the moment. People feel that Government is there to make life more difficult rather than easy and so that, and that’s not right, we really need to enhance and bed down that, that service. And I’m going to say I’d like to see on the skills side a lot more people from, from different communities getting the skills that they need to get into some of our fast-growing sectors like life sciences and tech but also construction, financial services, law and I’d like to see apprenticeships and other non-university forms of education playing a bigger role in that. So, if we have a, so I’m asking for a lot really, high streets renewed, small businesses energised and a socially mobile and economically mobile and aspirational population is what I’d like to see at the end of the term and if we can some movement towards that I’ll be happy.
Susan Freeman
That’s a terrific wish list and that sounds great. Howard, thank you so much for your time today, I know you’re very busy so, thank you.
Howard Dawber
Thank you very much, thanks for having me on.
Susan Freeman
Thank you so much Howard for talking to us about your role and your aspirations for the regeneration of London. I know from seeing you in action in New York that you’ll be covering a lot of ground and putting a huge amount of energy into everything that you do.
So that’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. Please join us for the next PropertyShe podcast interview coming very soon.
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