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 Chris Grigg. Chris is the Chairman of the UK Infrastructure Bank and of Evelyn Partner, the wealth management company. He’s also a member of the Corporate Board of Cancer Research UK. He stepped down as Senior Independent Director of BAE Systems PLC at the end of 2023. In his executive career, Chris most recently was CEO of British Land. Before that he was CEO of Barclays Commercial Bank. His earlier career was spent at Goldman Sachs where he was a partner and at Morgan Grenfell. Chris has an MA in Economics from the University of Cambridge. He was awarded a CBE in the 2021 New Year Honours for Services to Business, particularly during the Covid-19 response. So now we are going to hear from Chris Grigg on his impressive career to date, which started in banking, moved on to real estate and is now firmly back in banking. Chris, welcome to the virtual studio. Where are you speaking to us from today?
Chris Grigg
I’m actually in Harpenden in my study at home, having braved the wet weather outside to get back here this afternoon.
Susan Freeman
I was just thinking as I was preparing for the conversation that you started your career in banking, moved into real estate for a period and you’re now back with a bank so, there’s something sort of quite poetic about that.
Chris Grigg
I think it’s not so much a plan than it’s just been a series of slightly random walks but it’s worked okay for me.
Susan Freeman
Was it a clear path into investment banking originally? Is that what you always wanted to do growing up?
Chris Grigg
No is the short answer but I was always, when I got to university I wanted to do something in kind of business and at the time merchant banking, as was then, was quite a popular place to go, they were recruiting people and I didn’t really fancy having gone through university, I didn’t really fancy another three years of exams doing accountancy, so banking seemed a, seemed a more fun option and indeed I really enjoyed it from day one, I was lucky.
Susan Freeman
So, was it fun? It was Morgan Stanley or was it Morgan Grenfell?
Chris Grigg
It was Morgan Grenfell to start with, I did three years there and I think, you know, it was sort of, it’s a long time ago now but it was in the run up to Big Bang and so the whole financial sector was kind of changing, getting more interesting and so, as it grew, I think a group of relatively young people got quite a lot of responsibility quite early on because you know that tends to be what happens when expansion happens because, you know, there aren’t quite enough senior people to go around and that proved to be the case.
Susan Freeman
Yes, I think it’s, it is character building isn’t it when you, you get that sort of responsibility early on. I think these days we tend to be quite protective of you know our younger people coming up through the organisations and sometimes it’s good for people to have to face something that they don’t know how to deal with.
Chris Grigg
Yes and I think with that sort of enthusiasm and willingness to try new things in part because you don’t know the established ways comes innovation and all sorts of things and at the time, there were things like, Heavens to Betsy, I mean we were actually just at the beginning of the time when, when kind of laptop or desktop computers, PCs, were coming to the fore and that enabled a whole sort of string of innovations around derivative swaps and all that stuff and I was lucky enough to be involved in that.
Susan Freeman
So, after that you were, I think headhunted by Goldman Sachs, is that right?
Chris Grigg
That’s right, yes, mainly because I’d got involved, or interested in, derivatives and at the time Goldman saw that as an important market and so they, you know, hired a few people who’d got some of that experience, again, you know, not that much experience because the whole space was exploding at the time.
Susan Freeman
Did you have to work hard there? What was the sort of work ethic at the time?
Chris Grigg
Er yes, I think, I think work ethic probably sums it up quite well. I always remember one of my colleagues saying, “The thing is, Chris, I’ve decided that this year,” he was my boss at the time and he said, you know, “I’ve decided I’m going to live better this year, Chris and that means that you’re going to live worse” which probably doesn’t come quite into the modern vocabulary of management but at the time it do, so, it was what it was.
Susan Freeman
Yes, there probably wasn’t the same concern over the wellbeing of staff as there is now.
Chris Grigg
No but I think the flip side of that was probably that thing about responsibility and being given early responsibility and getting a sense that if things happened, it was down to you, which is quite an empowering thing compared with just working hard but feeling you’re just being told what to do all the time. But also a lot of my friends at that time were junior doctors, I’m married to a doctor and so, you know that kind of, they were all working very long hours and very hard and doing you know more important work than me and being paid less for it, which was always quite a chastening experience and so forth.
Susan Freeman
How long did you stay at Goldmans?
Chris Grigg
Twenty years.
Susan Freeman
Ah.
Chris Grigg
Whis is quite a long time. And I enjoyed it. There’s no doubt about that. I’ve, you know, they were great people, I think we did a lot of innovative things and a lot of things that people talk about with respect to Goldman, certainly for my time there, I didn’t really recognise them and I think people tried to do the best for their clients and yes, there was a hard, hard work ethic but, no, I enjoyed it.
Susan Freeman
So, all that probably equipped you quite well to be CEO of Barclays Commercial Bank during the global financial crisis which was clearly quite a challenge.
Chris Grigg
Yes, I think, although I really enjoyed my time at Goldman, I kind of felt after the last few years were kind of not as satisfying, not as much fun and I kind of had a feeling that I was done with the place and they were probably done with me and so it was quite an elegant exit but it was an exit nevertheless and I didn’t want to go back into investment banking, I got lucky in being hired by Barclays in the first place to be the Treasurer and then to go on quite quickly to run the Commercial Bank and that seemed, you know that was very much in the kind of late noughties before you know it became quite apparent that things were going to go wrong but in my time there they did go wrong and again, I think that was a great learning experience to see businesses struggle, to see some of the decisions and obviously the GFC itself was pretty scary and it’s probably the only time in my career where the closer you got to something in terms of a problem, the more you realised it was a big problem, and I think that a lot of the time when you get close to a big problem, you realise that the people kind of near the centre of the thing kind of know what needs to be done and there was a scariness about the GFC which was different and I think most people who were reasonably involved in that remember, you know, moments of that with something between sort of fear and terror. There’s a great story of Hank Paulson, who had been a boss at Goldman, you know, dry heaving into a wastebin in the US Treasury, which is where he was the boss, because he was so scared about what could happen and I, that resonates with some of the experiences I had.
Susan Freeman
And does it make you more cautious though, you know having been through something like that and seeing what can go wrong, does it make you more cautious about making decisions going forward?
Chris Grigg
I don’t think it should make you more careful about making decisions, I think that if I’ve learnt anything, hopefully my years in business it is, it’s very important that you kind of keep up a momentum of taking decisions and don’t put things off. Very often when things do go wrong, in my experience they go wrong as much because people have failed to take decisions or have put off making the tough decisions for one reason or another, whereas I think if people kind of recognise there is a problem and row towards that problem if you will, there’s a better chance of, of solving it and a better chance of solving it quickly and potentially a better chance of mitigating the implications quicker.
Susan Freeman
So, I mean was there any of that at Barclays you know when you arrived at the financial crisis, I mean were there things that you wished you’d done?
Chris Grigg
It’s a great question. I think, if I look back, that there was, you know it was a global crisis, there were very few people who were taking those really big decisions that made a huge difference, I mean I think it’s commonly held now that some of the decisions to let one or two of the US financial players in particular go bust, was probably a mistake because people didn’t quite understand the degree of kind of contagion that could happen and that made the next step harder. To some extent, I think in the UK we were slower to get over the crisis than say the US was. Now there are a bunch of reasons for that but I think to some extent people were perhaps reluctant to add to the sides of the write-offs where it was the Americans who tended always to kind of cut deep, cut quickly and then move on. I think there was a bit of a reluctance to do that.
Susan Freeman
So, you got through that and a couple of years later I think Stephen Hester was leaving British Land to go to NatWest so British Land were looking for a new CEO, I mean were you looking for a real estate role at that time?
Chris Grigg
I couldn’t claim to be looking for a real estate role, I mean, in many ways it was all wrapped up in the financial crisis in the sense that, you know Stephen went to Royal Bank because Royal Bank was, well it had just been nationalised and needed kind of radical surgery and so I think that people perceived him as being the right person for that job and I think he did a great job but that meant that, and literally Stephen kind of left one Friday and never came back, such was the nature of the crisis so, British Land was, and the then Chair was a guy called Chris Gibson-Smith told the story that actually, Gordon Brown rang him up and said, “I’m terribly sorry, you can’t have your Chief Executive back.” So that gives you a sense of the kind of sense of the crisis and I was, I’d got to the point in my career where I liked the idea of running something kind of myself and when I got called and said would I be interested in talking to BL about being Chief Executive, it wasn’t a very hard decision to say yes and I’d done real estate deals over time so I knew something of the industry but I wouldn’t have ever claimed to, and didn’t claim to be an expert.
Susan Freeman
So, you know as you say, it was sort of just at the end of the financial crisis.
Chris Grigg
It didn’t feel like the end at the time.
Susan Freeman
Okay, so you were still going through the financial crisis.
Chris Grigg
That’s what it felt like.
Susan Freeman
And at that time what, I mean, how was the real estate sector dealing with this?
Chris Grigg
Well, if you remember there were a bunch of rights issues done by the bigger players and we were, we did one of the first and I think to some extent, and I never had the conversation with the Chair, probably sensibly, as to why they hired me but I suspect that it had something to do with the fact that you know I was seen as somebody who would understand the balance sheet, who would be able you know to have some credibility in terms of raising money and those sorts of things and I think that helped at that time that I kind of knew how the City worked, if you will, and that it was important because people were very, very nervous at the time and so there was an element of, you know, kind of needing to, to be confident that we could raise the money and it wouldn’t just, just be us because, you know, and you come back to that contagion word again, it was important for a number of people to raise some cash.
Susan Freeman
And I mean at that time did you know the sort of personalities in the real estate sector?
Chris Grigg
Not really, I mean I think, you know that first six months to a year was probably as much about, as I say, you know, not survival because we were never in that position but trying to just stabilise, figure out what was going to happen next but I gradually obviously got to know the industry and one of my first recollections of the real estate industry was how welcoming people were. Here am I a banker from Nowheresville and you know, a lot of people would walk up and introduce themselves and offer to help and be very friendly and make suggestions in a positive way, which I found good and refreshing I would say and so I got to know a lot of people relatively quickly having, you know obviously after the first few months, which were a bit intense.
Susan Freeman
And were there any other surprises when you took the helm?
Chris Grigg
For sure. You know my view on this but I was certainly surprised that the kind of lack of diversity in the industry and you know everybody talks about, and talked then about banking being a bit behind and I wouldn’t quarrel with that but it was a bit of a shock to see. I remember having a conversation you know with people about saying, well why, why would you have women on, why would you need women on the board or, you know, and all those sorts of conversations which were, you know hopefully things have improved since those days but that was a shock at the time.
Susan Freeman
And I think you, you had a female Finance Director at the time didn’t you?
Chris Grigg
Not to start with, no, we had a male Finance Director actually before we appointed Lucinda, who went on actually to run a property company and then, Graham Roberts, and then sadly died quite young, which was very sad because she’d done a really good job but, as I say, he died and then Lucinda joined the Board and became Finance Director and that, you know that I think was good for everybody.
Susan Freeman
No and hopefully things have moved on.
Chris Grigg
I think so, I think so. I mean, look, I think, you know you talk to people in lots of industries and there’s clearly still more to be done and hopefully the discussion has moved beyond just gender in terms of diversity but I, my sense is over the, you know, the time since call it the late noughties, things have changed and an awful lot of companies are very, and individuals, are very focussed on you know maintaining the improvement and continuing with the improvement and I think that’s terrific and is good for the business, it’s good for the industry, it’s good for decision making.
Susan Freeman
Yes and of course one of the challenges is, is trying to get sort of young people coming into the industry from different backgrounds and you know also non-real estate backgrounds to help a little bit with mixing things up a bit. So, you mentioned the rights issue and then you I think were able to go on and start developing so, what were the sort of projects that you got stuck into?
Chris Grigg
I suppose the one that I’ll always think of as being the kind of big decision because it was early, was the Cheesegrater because you know at the time you know people were very concerned about where new lettings were going to come for, that previously the building had been, the building, the hole in the ground had been kind of mothballed because there wasn’t the development finance or the appetite for risk available at the time and so working on that, you know we did a joint venture with Oxford Properties, it’s one of their first deals in the UK, that was a fun thing to do, it was a proper partnership and I think worked well for both parties, so I kind of think that, that was the one that I’ll remember the most because it, it kind of encapsulated the big calls that go into development and also how much you can make if you get a little bit fortunate with your timing and good judgement, you can always say that but you need a bit of luck as well and we got some early lettings and got a lot of momentum for, you know, what remains a very good-looking building, which is always nice.
Susan Freeman
And at the time, were, were other developers more hesitant about sort of moving into big projects?
Chris Grigg
I think there was a lot of hesitancy from everybody, if truth be known, you know, over a relatively short period of time people went from “you must be joking” to “there must be some opportunities here” and it sort of didn’t matter in my view who was first and there was always debate about whether or Landsec went first and but to me that’s not the important thing, the important thing was some more confidence came in both kind of generally in terms of tenants being prepared to you know sign up for new space and us believing that we could do something interesting and raise finance and so, I think it was just a, you know, it was a fun time after a very tough period and obviously, you know, if you’re in the real estate business there’s something quite attractive about watching buildings go up.
Susan Freeman
Yes, I must say there must be, you know, just to be able to look at building like that and say well, you know, “I was responsible for that”, it’s quite something. And did you then, I mean look at changing strategy when you came in? How did you do things differently?
Chris Grigg
One of the things we talked about a lot was that real estate had become more kind of intense from a management perspective, particularly in the businesses that we were in and over time you know we worked really, in our retail business we worked really well, hard to get to know the retailers, to work with them, you know to try and do big deals which crossed right across our own retail parks and retail centres and had been known as people who wanted to do business and weren’t just interested in trying to, you know, 25 year leases and, not that there’s anything wrong that when you can get them but trying to work to create place, we had this thing, ‘places people prefer’, you know, and trying to make them really attractive to the people who are either is thinking about, not just the retailer but their customers and thinking not just about the people who pay the rent but the people who are coming if you like through the turnstiles and I think that was a, you know, that that seemed to work quite well for a period of time and I think it was quite an interesting step for British Land.
Susan Freeman
And then there’s also I think the focus on the office campuses to actually, again, I suppose make places more attractive for people to spend their time.
Chris Grigg
Yeah, and try and, in that context, think about what was going on outside the front door of the building and not just within the building so, as you say, you know, the coffee shops and not just relying on you know the big chains but to try and make the experience interesting. We also, you know, in our own way got into the kind of flexible space business with a kind of subsidiary called Storey and the idea again was trying to find smaller occupiers because that would create more of a buzz on some of our campuses, we’d have different sorts of people and obviously we always hoped that they would get better and bigger and take more space but the idea as much was to make sure that there were interesting conversations going on that people felt that they were working somewhere that was interesting, as opposed to just in some of somewhat anonymous, huge building.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, which are all things that we are continuing to think about and talk about.
Chris Grigg
Sure, and, and look, I’m not claiming it was all original thought, I think in any business you’re constantly trying to find good ideas and see if you can have an angle to them or just shamelessly copy them, where appropriate and I think from my perspective we try to do all of those things and talk about it, the campus thing and the reason we, we even changed the name because when I arrived we were talking about estates and that felt a very kind of old fashioned kind of landed family, not, you know, we wanted it to feel different, to have that sense of energy and people, as you said earlier, where people would want to come and work and therefore would pay the rent.
Susan Freeman
And one of the things obviously people talk about was the you know sale of I think it was half of Broadgate or half of Meadowhall, presumably those decisions were because you needed to raise money.
Chris Grigg
I think two things, right. We were very exposed. Broadgate was seen as everybody would say British Land, who owns Broadgate and Meadowhall and I certainly felt that that sense of being so kind of focussed on two assets might limit the ambitions of the company to be more than just the owner of a couple of bits of real estate and that was, but in truth the financial decision was more important. I actually bumped into in London earlier today, I bumped into one of the equity analysts who I’d known obviously for a long time and we were laughing about the fact that you know people talk about strategy a lot in real estate and you know, what sometimes gets forgotten is strategy is A, a lot easier to do in retrospect and B, you don’t always have the pick of all the buildings you might want to sell because only some of them can be sold and then afterwards you have to kind of explain it a bit and we’ve seen some of that recently, I think we’re going to see more of it by the way in Europe in the next year or two because that market is going to struggle a bit, I suspect.
Susan Freeman
Yes, it will create some interesting opportunities for people. Well we just talked a little bit about how the industry has changed, you obviously had, I mean I think twelve years at British Land so, I mean apart from the diversity issue which is obviously ongoing, I mean is there anything else you think really, really changed during that period?
Chris Grigg
Well, it would be sort of shocking if it didn’t wouldn’t it, over twelve years. I think about that period and beyond, for sure I think people think about the assets in a more dynamic way as opposed to kind of buy the asset, clip the coupons, maybe redevelop it, I think people are now much more focused on how they need to develop the business around the buildings and the buildings around the business, I think that’s been a positive thing. I don’t think I know the second thing I would highlight has been just how much broader the industry has come in terms of kind of subsectors. When I arrived most people talked about kind of, you know, offices, retail, sheds as being the three main things. Now you wouldn’t, you just wouldn’t think like that today, I think that’s been very healthy for the industry and I think that’ll continue, I also believe that there’ll be further lowering of the edges. You know I’m involved in infrastructure today and I think it’s clear that, you know some of the characteristics of some types of infrastructure in terms of long cashflows generated out of physical things if you will, that means that people will be thoughtful about what sort of, where they invest across just a broader range of types of asset and I think that’s going to be in some ways a challenge for the industry because if you think about the energy transition then that’s creating lots of investible opportunities, some of which will be very long-term, some of which you know may in some ways be “safter” than real estate, so I think there’s going to be more competition for, for investment in different asset classes either directly in real estate or around the edges of real estate, if I was going to try and predict change here.
Susan Freeman
Yes, so it’s probably a good point to actually talk about your infrastructure role at the UK Infrastructure Bank and you stepped down from British Land in 2020 so having joined towards the end of the financial crisis, you left during the Covid lockdown.
Chris Grigg
Thank you for reminding me of that bookending of my real estate career.
Susan Freeman
Well, yes, so, you know obviously you went there. Why did you decide to stand down then?
Chris Grigg
I’d always believed that real estate’s a long cycle asset class hopefully, it’s not always but usually and so it didn’t feel to me that having a career as Chief Executive or call it ten years was a particularly bad thing, there are other industries, people take a slightly different view. Point one. Point two, I was you know toward the end of what I thought was a sensible time when you start to think am I, am I getting too blinkered in my thinking, am I rejecting new ideas because I, they didn’t work a decade ago and I’m convinced they still wouldn’t work so, is that sense of maybe being a bit stale. I hoped I wasn’t but you never know and it is a particular sort of job and it felt that that was about the right time. I probably stayed on a little bit longer than I had originally intended because with Covid, it just didn’t, A it was just harder to get the process through of kind of sorting through my replacements and running that process and second of all, it just didn’t seem very smart to kind of put your hands up and say, “Hey, I’ve done eleven years, I’m leaving now” and “See ya”. That’s not in my view what good leaders do, they try and make sure that their successors and the success of process is done properly and everybody kind of thinks it’s a sensible time for you to leave and it felt by the, you know, toward the end of 2020 that that was the original balance. So that, that’s how the timing came about.
Susan Freeman
And were you looking for another CEO role?
Chris Grigg
No, I felt, I felt I’d got the CEO thing out of my system. And partly because I really loved the job at British Land and it didn’t feel that there would be another CEO job that I would really relish in the same way, so I wanted to do something different and so, going a bit plural, potentially chairing some businesses, was a sort of appealing idea. I had had some plans to kind of take a bit of time off and go travelling and so forth like lots of people do but yet again, the pandemic you know made that rather a pipe dream, at least in the near term, so it was really the alternative felt like sitting in this study where I am now and doing nothing or sitting in the study and doing something perhaps, hopefully, somewhat constructive so I, and I got contacted and said would I help the UK Treasury to set up the bank and I just thought, “hey, that’ll be interesting” and it felt an important thing to do in the context of the road to Net Zero and potential to kind of help that process and maybe speed it up a tiny little bit.
Susan Freeman
So, I mean the opportunity to be instrumental in setting up the UK Infrastructure Bank from scratch, I mean certainly you know was a bit different and challenging so, do you want to tell our listeners a little bit about the bank, what it does and how it’s going to help the UK tackle climate change and get the economy growing and you know what you’re investing in.
Chris Grigg
Sure, so, we set it up just coming up to three years ago, having worked on it quite hard. Originally it had really been thought about as in the wake of Brexit, the EIB no longer being around for the UK so the idea of having a, if you like, a government development bank of some sort and that thinking really ended up focussing on two areas. The first of which is, you know, transition, road to Net Zero and the second is kind of what we call local and regional growth. We also do some work with local authorities but it was a very specific mission and therefore what we tend to do is lend to projects but we can invest anywhere on the capital stack, so we’ve done deals as varied as taking an equity stake in the first lithium mine in Cornwall for forever. We’ve also lent money to the interconnector between the UK and Germany, that was perhaps less critical from the point of getting it done but there was a big feeling that wit the EIB involved in the Euro part, not having the UK Infrastructure Bank in was, would be a bit weird, if you see what I mean. But typically, we’ll be, you know we have segments of obvious transition areas that we’ll invest in and quite a variety but we keep on coming back to those focus sectors. We’ve just got now slightly over 200 people, we do deals typically kind of 50 to a couple of hundred million for debt, smaller potentially for equity contributions.
Susan Freeman
And would you invest in housing or roads or is that outside your remit?
Chris Grigg
No, so we, first of all we don’t give grants, so we won’t get involved in things which don’t have some sort of return, so roads would be a good example of that. We don’t do housing because we’ve got Homes England there, so what we’re very conscious of is not, the last thing we want to do is kind of trample across other people’s space. It is conceivable that we could invest in situations where you know we were looking at retrofitting with respect at you know improving buildings’ efficiency but we don’t do social infrastructure. So, it’s kind of the hard end of infrastructure, if you see what I mean.
Susan Freeman
And I mean what sort of figures are we talking about? How much have you got to invest?
Chris Grigg
For the first five years we’ve got £22 billion worth of investible funds which comes in the form of basically, we can lend money and we can guarantee and it’s split between that and… of that 22, 4 million is kind hypothecated to the local authorities, as an example, and we, we’ve just done a deal for TFL to announce a rolling stock for the DLR, which obviously needed modernisation so, again, that sort of ticks a couple of boxes from our perspective, well three if you… local, effectively local authorities, that’s part of what we’re supposed to be doing, so infrastructure for local authorities is you know obviously efficient in terms of low carbon and third of all, you know goes through some of the poorest areas of London and therefore some of the poorest areas of the UK so, you know, it kind of, for us it’s quite a big set of ticks.
Susan Freeman
And so, if your bank wasn’t there, who would fund that?
Chris Grigg
Well, potentially the Government could do that through what’s known as the PSBR, Public Sector Loan Board but in this situation, it just felt that we’re an efficient lender because we can help potentially, you know with our infrastructure experience. But John Flint, who’s our Chief Executive always says, “We’re a very unusual bank because we have no competitors” because we’re required to make a return on capital but a lower one with commercial banks would do and if a project can be wholly financed through the private sector, we won’t be involved, there’s no need for us to be involved and so we’re also measured in terms of how much private sector money kind of comes with us into projects and we’ve got quite ambitious targets for that. So, that puts in a very strong position because people will come to us and ask us to help but we’ve also been in situations where that’s happened and then people have come back to us and said do you know what, we’ve got private sectors doing the whole of this and obviously disappoints the guys who worked on, or girls who worked hard on the project but it does mean that we’re in a position, indeed have to be disciplined about only using public money, which at the end of the day is your money and my money, in such a way that we’re achieving something that might not otherwise get done.
Susan Freeman
And you talk about in your annual report about crowding in private investment and what does that mean? Does that just mean bringing it with you?
Chris Grigg
Yes, so, a good example would be let’s suppose somebody is looking to raise a £100 million and can’t raise any of it on Day One. We come in and say look, we’ll be a cornerstone investor, we’ll take £25 to 50 million, let’s say and then that can often give a degree of confidence amongst the banks and so they come in with us and we spread the risk between us and we might end up with that £25 million, we might end up with a £50 million. It’s quite an interesting thing to do because obviously markets come and markets go, people get full of a particular asset class, we’ve done a lot of work in our kind of local and regional growth around full fibre broadband for areas which are either rural or poorer and that market has very much come and gone from a banking perspective and so we’re pretty clear that we’ve made a big difference in terms of the roll out of fibre to some of those areas and we’ve tried very hard to be targeted in where we’re going and not going where there’s already, you know, plenty of build.
Susan Freeman
And does there have to be a sort of carbon reduction element if you’re going to invest?
Chris Grigg
Not necessarily in that because if it comes under the local or regional growth category, it wouldn’t have to be. We have a kind of do no harm type rule, so we wouldn’t be involved for example in a coal mine or in oil, fracking or whatever, we just wouldn’t do that and the truth of the matter is that most of the projects that we do will be over time help toward in some way, shape or form, a greener economy but they don’t have to specifically be so, as an example, we’re investing in a company which is reducing certain types of relatively low value semi-conductors, which can be used on lots of products but that’s an area where A, it will create, we hope, will create a factory that will serve you know kind of sophisticated employment opportunities or high value employment opportunities but also over time it should improve and speed product delivery and so on and so forth.
Susan Freeman
One of the things we’ve see in the press is that when the bank was set up originally, some were saying oh it, you know it’s not, it’s not big enough than France and Germany are putting a lot more money into their infrastructure banks, I mean do you have any thoughts on that?
Chris Grigg
Well, the first thing is I wouldn’t have taken the job if I didn’t think it, you know, had the capacity to, to make a difference. I’m old enough to believe if you, you know, you’re only allotted so much time so you might as well be trying to do something that would be helpful to somebody or at least, so I think it is enough to make a difference and my view has always been, you know, 22 billion is a decent amount of anybody’s money and if we can leverage more money from the private sector then that’s a multiple of that 22 billion. The truth is you know the amounts of money involved to get to Net Zero are breathtakingly large. But if we’re seen as doing a good job then I’m very relaxed that people will end up giving us more money and of course, we’re a bank so, you know, that money over time will come back and we’ll be able to recycle it again and again. So, for all those reasons, I think the bank is, can and will make a difference and I think it’s more interesting to have a conversation with Government, you know, who’ve got lots and lots of different stresses and strains, that won’t change whomever is in power to be able to say look what we’ve done, you know, this is why you should give us some, allow us to do more, as opposed to going oh, we could not possibly operate until, unless we had 30 billion, I mean, that I don’t think holds water as an argument. I did try it but it didn’t work.
Susan Freeman
Well that, you know, it does make sense and of course people always want to criticise don’t they and I mean I was just wondering, obviously we have an election coming up and there may be a change of government. Does the, does the bank just sort of continue if there’s a change in government?
Chris Grigg
The easy answer is, I hope so. There’s an Act that supports the bank. The plan was always for it to be a long-term part of the financial, if you like, infrastructure of the UK. I’d like to think we’ve done enough good work already that means that people can point to stuff and frankly, I know how long it takes now to set up a new financial institution, it takes you about two and a half, three years, right, so it would be… we’ve done what, 28 deals now, and we’re there to solve problems in many ways so, it’ll be for the next government to decide but whenever I bump into people who have a view on these things or who are talking directly to the Labour Party, I will say well, you know, if you want us to do something slightly different, you have every right as a government to write to us and we’ll start doing it the next day, that’s how this thing kind of works. Why would you start again? That would be a waste of time. Now, as I say, that’s for them to decide, that’s the beauty of democracy and we’ll see.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, as I say, one of the problems is that politics is short-term, infrastructure is very long-term in some cases, as you say, you know setting up a new bank takes time. And you mentioned working with local authorities and I think there’s a local authority advisory service which is part, how does that operate?
Chris Grigg
In many ways the theory is somewhat the same. In other words, what we’re trying to help with is for local authorities to invest in projects that will help towards either, the two main things, right, local regional growth, easier to define with local authorities for obvious reasons or Net Zero. So, where, now the truth in the matter is that as we all know, the finances of local authorities have been very stretched for quite a considerable period of time, that means that often they don’t have the resources to do all the things they would like to do so what we’re trying to do is provide a service to those local authorities in areas where it’s relevant and so then hopefully, you can be in a situation where I mean if the grand plan works out, where we take specific ideas, heat networks would be a good example, low emission buses might be another, where you can take an idea and a project that is working in one place, hopefully you know if somebody has figured it all out, that’s terrific, we’ll go with it, we help them to figure out the best of financing it, the best way of structuring it, and the more that can become a cookie cutter type approach, to use the Americanism, in such a way that we could help more local authorities do that, then I think that’s slightly the benefit of being central and in that context, you know we’re very much set up to be for all four countries, not just England, so we’re opening representative offices in each of the four countries. I was actually up on Monday meeting our new country rep in, sounds a strange thing to say, for Scotland but in Edinburgh and you know that’s very much part of the work and he’ll be working with local authorities as well as private sector.
Susan Freeman
So you must be inundated with calls from local authorities wanting some advice.
Chris Grigg
For sure the trick is choosing carefully so that we don’t, you know we’ve only got limited resource and we’ve got, we’ve just gone past 200 fulltime, permanently employed, so we’ve got to be careful of our resource obviously but the more that we can find real problems and help address those and help kind of roll those solutions hopefully out to more places, then that feels like that will help one way or another.
Susan Freeman
And we’ve got MIPIM coming up in a couple of weeks where about 20,000 property professionals from all over the world get together in the south of France. I don’t know whether you are going to have any representatives there but who will your team want to hear from? What sort of projects are they looking for?
Chris Grigg
We’re not going but I think Central Government in these days would find that a bit of a struggle but to be clear, I’ve always been a fan of MIPIM but it’s really what I’ve said, what are the projects that need a bit of help but still offer a return which patently will either help towards Net Zero or towards local and regional growth and aren’t clearly somebody else’s territory, if you see what I mean, those are what we’re looking for. We’ve now got banking teams so we can be more responsive than we might have been six months or a year ago and we’ve got a track record, you know, obviously quite a lot of banks have now worked with us, I think that’s good as ever and our point about not having competitors and not, you know, we don’t have the same drivers that others do, which puts us in quite a powerful position to be helpful.
Susan Freeman
Well that sounds great. Well, Chris, I’m sorry I’m not going to be seeing you at MIPIM but I’m sure you will be hearing from people, that sounds very positive. So, so, thank you very much for your time today.
Chris Grigg
Not at all, my pleasure, Susan, it’s been great to talk to you.
Susan Freeman
Thank you, Chris Grigg for a terrific overview of the high points and challenges of a wide ranging career to date and it’s amazing to hear about the investment that’s going into our infrastructure with the UK Infrastructure Bank. 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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