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 the key influencers in the world of real estate and the built environment. Today I am delighted to welcome Fiona Fletcher-Smith. Fiona is Group Chief Executive of L&Q, one of the UK’s leading housing charities, with roots leading back nearly sixty years to the new wave of Housing Associations created in the 1960s, borne out of a growing social consciousness around housing and homelessness. Fiona joined L&Q as Development Director in 2018 and became CEO earlier this year. In her time at L&Q, Fiona has spearheaded their £5.1 billion development programme, led their expansion into the Midlands and North West and delivered change programmes to improve both the efficiency and diversity of their development and sales function. Prior to joining L&Q, Fiona was the Executive Director for Development, Enterprise and Environment at the GLA. As part of the senior management team, she was responsible for overseeing the delivery and implementation of key strategies such as the London Plan, the Economic Development strategy, transport, environment and climate change, and in overseeing the operation of the Mayor’s powers in relation to significant planning applications in the capital. But now we are going to hear from Fiona Fletcher-Smith on dealing with the challenges and opportunities for one of the UK’s largest Housing Associations. Fiona, welcome to the studio.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Thank you.
Susan Freeman
Where are you speaking to me from? It looks like home.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
It is. Still home, I’m afraid. What are we in now, this must be month fourteen?
Susan Freeman
I know, and it must have been particularly difficult for you because it’s a pretty tall order to start a new role as CEO of a multimillion pound Housing Association in the throws of lockdown so, how in practical terms did you manage?
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Well, Susan, I think I was fairly lucky because being the internal candidate, I already new the executive team really well because I was part of that team and I also knew the staff group very well. It’s desperately frustrating, my natural instinct is to get out, to meet people, to walk around our estates and our properties and just see how things are going but I’ve done my best. I think at L&Q, we hit the ground running in terms of how we communicated with staff, starting last March so we’ve been doing fortnightly live broadcasts to all staff, we have been doing online team meetings and really keeping the communication going, keep talking to the staff so, yeah, if I stop and think about it, it is very odd to take over this huge role from my dining room but because I’d been there for almost three years now already, it was easier than it would have been for someone coming in brand new to the organisation.
Susan Freeman
I can… I think it would be very, very difficult for somebody, you know, coming in and not really knowing the personalities. And so, you initially joined L&Q in 2018 as Development Director. What made you make the move from the GLA because you had been there for I think over then years, what prompted it?
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
It was really interesting, I had to make a decision at that stage, the post of Chief Officer at the GLA was vacant and I had to really decide whether that would be my next move and what interested me was to move from the theoretical and that’s what you do a lot of in City Hall, you create strategy and policy and City Hall in itself doesn’t have a lot of money so you are using influence and persuasion to – and whatever policy you have – to make things happen. What interested me about L&Q, well there were a number of things, but one of the big things was about rolling up my sleeves and actually building some homes for Londoners rather than simply looking at the planning policy, looking at land use, looking at housing policy and economic development and this was a job that was far more real to me so, that was interesting. But also, I don’t know if you know, but when I was an undergraduate, I used to temp during my summer breaks, with L&Q way, way, way back in the mists of time and I had fallen in love with it as an organisation and always watched it from a distance, never thinking I would actually go back and work there so, when I was approached to apply for the Development Director’s job, it just seemed, it seemed to be fate as much as anything else.
Susan Freeman
No, I didn’t know that at all but that is great because sometimes, you know, things are meant to happen and no I didn’t know because is know that you effectively spent 25 years working in local and regional Government so, you know, you’ve been through a number of the London local authorities but I think Westminster, Lambeth, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Hackney before you went to the GLA so, I just, I wondered if there was anything that had really surprised you from being on the developer side of the fence having spent, you know, so long looking at developers from the Local Authority point of view.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
I think what surprised me most is, was the absolute ignorance about how the local politics of an area works, what the processes are, how you actually engage with the public sector. It still felt, when I joined, it felt very heavy-handed from the developer point of view, it seemed to ride roughshod over local policies and believe that the developer knows best and as a Housing Association certainly, that shouldn’t be the case, we should be seeking all the time to work with the grain of an area and the grain of an area is expressed in local policies. The other thing that always amazed me was a dismissal of democracy and, you know, I’ve been at various dinners, I think you and I have probably been at various dinners together where we will hear developers say, ‘Ugh, the planning system. It would be fantastic if we could just take those politicians out of it’ but what those politicians do is stand for election every four years, they stand up in front of the people who live in the area and they represent their views and we have to listen because the reasons a big development gets such a bad name and nimbyism increases no matter what you try and do, is if you ride roughshod over local desires, local needs, now that said it’s also about pushing boundaries of thinking through local policies and local plans but once they’ve expressed a view, we really should work with that grain so the level of ignorance amazed me and I’m still doing a lot of work about… with our staff, getting them to understand the importance of local democracy and the importance of even the backbench councillor because, you know, they’ve done something I would never be brave enough to do, they’ve gone out, knocked on doors and said ‘Hey, vote for me’. It’s a brave move.
Susan Freeman
You are right and you know you mentioned sitting around various you know tables, debating some of these things and one of the things I’ve been particularly struck by is hearing from local, you know, leaders and councillors about what happens when they put their head above the parapet to represent the community and it’s, you know, it’s really difficult. So, there’s obviously a lot to be done in terms of building homes and, you know, making up the deficit in housing numbers and we know that that requires collaboration between the private sector and the public sector. I mean, do you see that sort of any differently now, obviously, you know, you’ve made the point that developers need to understand, you know, the community and the way local authorities work but you know is there anything more that developers could do to create more trust between themselves and the Local Authority?
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Yeah. Well, the first thing is the obvious thing which is about listening and actively listening, not coming in with a fully baked idea to see a local leader. You have to allow them to influence, to discuss, to explain their areas and their local priorities to you. You’ve got to leave your arrogance at the door and actually this view that the private sector have that politicians, local politicians, don’t understand the need to make a profit, is rubbish, they absolutely do and they absolutely appreciate that because that’s how society and capitalism works, it’s how it goes. So, do not be afraid of talking about the viability of a scheme and what is affecting the viability of a scheme. Honesty, as much as you can possibly be, be transparent and yeah, listen, listen, listen and listen hard enough frankly to change your mind if you need to because that’s okay too. It’s also important not to disappear back into a black box to come out with yet another proposal. Actually make sure that local leaders are part of your thinking process and how you are evolving your ideas and your thoughts. It’s hard work but it’s really, really rewarding. The other side of it is, you mentioned the word ‘trust’ and trust in post-Grenfell world for major housebuilders for example, is in short supply. We have not as an industry covered ourselves in glory have we in terms of the quality and safety of homes we’re providing. We have got to get that right, we have got to put right what we did wrong in the first place whether it’s on workmanship, whatever it is, we’ve got to put it right. That is absolutely essential and we have to really, really embrace Dame Hackitt’s recommendations on the Golden Thread and then how we work as an industry. This is our chance to rebuild that trust and to get it right and again, that’s not simple and I do wish some of my colleagues in the industry would stop putting a lot of energy into wriggling out of this and to just get on with it.
Susan Freeman
Yes, and I think it is going to mean, you know, whichever way you look at it, the money that’s needed to, you know, deal with the remediation is not going to go into building new homes and I think you said that you are going to be moving back from the ambition of delivering 100,000 new homes over ten years so, I mean how much time, energy and money is going to go into, you know, dealing with the cladding issue because you, I mean, you’ve got a large portfolio, there must be just hundreds of buildings that need to be dealt with.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
We have, we’ve dealt with the most serious of the problems already and we also understand the extent of the risk for us and we’ve put mitigation measures in place, whether that’s Waking Watch, whether that is sprinkler and alarm systems so, we’ve dealt with the most urgent but if you look across the stock of 110,000 homes, probably about 200 buildings over 18 metres, yes, we have a lot more to do. So, we will be setting aside an amount of money, probably in the region of £250 million over the next five years to deal with the over 18 metre buildings and we’re waiting for Government guidance on what they want to do below that height but we will be working our way through this on a risk based approach, making sure that we deal with all of the fire risk issues that are emerging whether that is wooden cladding, wooden covered balconies, whatever it is, we will come round and sort it out but that means, as you picked up on, that the money that we would have had to put into development, is simply not there. We are making no excuse for the fact we are prioritising the safety of our existing residents and their homes and investment in our existing stock. So, that means that we will go from an ambition of a 100,000 over a decade which was the equivalent of 10,000 homes per year, to building in the region of about 3,000 homes per year which for any developer or any Housing Association, is still a fairly chunky development programme but we are prioritising the people who live in our homes first.
Susan Freeman
And will you get Government assistance in the form of grants? How much of it will be from the Government and because, you know, as you say, you are putting £250 million in? Do you get help with that?
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Well we have along with probably everyone else who has got a tall building, put in applications for the Building Safety Fund and we are hopeful but we’re not relying on that, we’re not waiting for it, we are just getting on with works, we can’t assume that we’re going to get grants from that source. I mean, the Government has… the Government is doing its best and setting aside more money for this is really, really welcome. None of us got into this intentionally. The people I worry about are our leaseholders who potentially face very large bills and we are absolutely doing what we can to minimise any bills that we have to pass on. So, the Government’s Building Safety Fund is really helpful in that regard.
Susan Freeman
And, alongside this there is also the question of, you know, sustainability and retrofitting existing housing stock to combat climate change, I mean, will you be going ahead with that at the same time or does that programme get set back because you are dealing with the cladding issues?
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Well, it’s a very interesting question on Earth Day. I do feel the Government is slightly dodging the question about what they are going to say about residential property. They talk a lot about electric cars, which is wonderful, well done, but actually one of the biggest emitters of carbon is our residential stock and what are we going to do about it? If you own and manage 110,000 homes, this is a big issue. I think it’s very easy to break into the new development side and get it right from day one. Going back to retrofit buildings really, really difficult but what we are doing is two things, we are looking at the new Future Home Standard that will come out eventually from the White Paper and we are looking at our sustainability strategy and trying to bring forward as much work as we can. Later this month, and there’s not much of it left, later this month we will publish our ESG framework which will contain a lot more information about our plans on environmental sustainability but the ideal for me is you bring those two things together, the Future Home Standard and environmental sustainability. We shouldn’t be putting scaffolding up on a building to do things twice, we should be, once we’re up there we should be doing both of the Decent Homes and environmental sustainability together but we do need the Government to actually step up and tell us where they are going to pitch this because until they do, what I am worried about is the… if you use the example of the electric care issue, they made a very clear statement about petrol engines, diesel engines, we know where it’s going, therefore the car industry has adapted its entire R&D and production lines to produce electric cars. Even in my own home, my gas boiler is coming to the end of its life, I don’t know what to do next, I don’t know what the technology is so, if the Government comes out with a very clear statement that this is what we expect, the entire industry associated with heating and ventilation will then turn all its R&D efforts into producing what is going to sell so, there’s that lack of clarity is damaging us all.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, and knowing that real estate is responsible for some 40% of global carbon emissions, I think, you know, I was actually quite surprised when I was looking at aviation because aviation gets a bad press, you know, because of carbon, that is like just over 2% so the property sector really, I mean you are right, we need certainty, you know what do you do because you can deal with newbuild and you know use sustainable materials and do that but most of our housing, in fact our you know commercial stock is older so…
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
And it’s really interesting as well because I’ve been trying to have conversations with officials about obsolescence of buildings and what do we do next so when Decent Homes was introduced by the Labour Government way back in whenever it was, 2000, they recognised that some buildings were, some housing blocks were incapable of being made decent so there was, they set aside estate regeneration money where if demolition was the only option, you were able to rebuild. It doesn’t seem to be on the table here. They understand the concept of obsolescence in buildings but they don’t understand what we need to do if somebody is actually living in an obsolete building.
Susan Freeman
And then you’ve got the problem that, you know, demolition and then rebuild is also not terribly sustainable so it raises all sorts of questions. So, I was looking at the L&Q website and, you know, one of the sort of clear messages is that everything you do begins with social purpose and do you think that the real estate sector is beginning to understand the need to provide, you know, social value and that it’s not just, you know, the Housing Associations that need to be, you know, thinking that way?
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Yes I do, I think I genuinely believe in ESG and the whole real estate industry is really getting their heads round it, as are bankers and investors and, you know, I’ve done a round of meetings with banks and investors recently and the questions I’m being asked about what are we doing on our ESG framework have been well-informed, probing, serious, so I think everybody gets it so I really have high hopes. Where it’s great for a Housing Association is, this is all we do, it’s all we’ve ever done, it’s all about social purpose, the environmental sustainability is only one element of it, our L&Q Foundation for example this year has got over 300 people into jobs and this during a pandemic when a lot of the sectors that many of our residents would work in have been closed down or on more or less permanent furlough so we’ve been doing a lot of this work naturally for decades so, I’m just glad everyone else is joining the party.
Susan Freeman
No, I agree, and you hear developers talking, you know, about happiness and social purpose and these things and I think, you are right, talking about investors because I think if the developers don’t get it themselves, they are going to be moved along by their investors and also tenants coming along wanting to know that, you know, the everything.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Yeah, I mean, our tenants at L&Q, we have a new Resident Services Board and it’s not often I come out of a meeting at half eight in the evening, energised because, as you know, 25 years in the public sector, I’ve done lots of those Jackie Weaver-type meetings where like slow, soul destroying evenings but I had a meeting with our new Residents Board who were really quizzing me on environment sustainability and how was I going to engage with them and they had lots of ideas and it was a genuine feeling of co-production of the services we’re going to deliver the investment we’re going to do, it’s not about us doing it them in a paternalistic way, it is genuinely a frank level conversation with our residents, it was brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
Susan Freeman
And do you find actually having been forced into, you know, doing these meetings on Zoom and Teams over the last year, has that actually sort of helped get people involved that weren’t necessarily involved before or will it be…?
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Absolutely because you know, nobody likes the idea of having to go to a draughty Church hall on a Tuesday night in November. Ugh, you know, as a woman, you often don’t feel safe being out after dark, you know, it’s taken me a long time to realise why I don’t feel safe but, I don’t feel safe, and it’s cold and it’s miserable and if you’ve got caring responsibilities or children, you know, what are you going to do so, this has allowed so many more people to get engaged. We had a residents’ conference about two months ago on a Saturday afternoon and normally you just get sort of the older, retired group who would be able to turn up physically. This time, we had about 350 residents of all sorts of types of residents engaged because all they had to do was dial in from their living room on a Saturday afternoon, many of them had their kids playing behind them, you know, in the same way that we all do and it was brilliant, it was absolutely brilliant. But what I’d love Susan, is a more mixed economy, I’d love to be out a little bit, a little bit on Zoom, yeah, we will get there.
Susan Freeman
I think we will get there but I think there are certain benefits from you know doing these online meetings. Just sort of moving the conversation slightly, I think you’ve been involved in developing sort of L&Q opportunities in the North West outside of London so I guess you are keen to support the Government’s levelling up ambitions and to focus investment a little bit outside of London so I just wondered what you were seeing, you know, in the North West?
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Well, we have fantastic partners in Trafford Housing Trust. The team up there are amazing. Sean Anstee who is their Chair, is absolutely brilliant. What we are seeing there is a lot of energy and a lot of coherent public sector policy and we are seeing opportunities and it’s not just about L&Q moving into the North West and displacing lots of other people, it is about recognising with an organisation of our size and the strength of our balance sheet, we can do big things in the North West in the same way that are doing Barking Riverside for example, we can go into post-industrial land in need of remediation and we can really work with the public sector and other Housing Associations and developers in the area to do something at scale so we’re very, very, very keen on something major in the North West. We have retained our commitment to build 20,000 homes over the next decade in the North West. We see that as a massive growth place for us and it’s interesting for us as well, the… having been a London-centric organisation for so long, people always assume that housing need is only in London and the South East problem but it’s all relative so if you look at the difference between the average salary or wage in the North West and house prices, you can see some areas of the North West are deeply, deeply unaffordable. The Borough of Trafford itself, the south of Trafford towards places like Timperley and Altrincham, actually incredibly expensive places to live and comparable to London boroughs. So we also hope that we’ll be able to create affordable housing in the North West, particularly shared ownership which is still quite a new product in some parts of the North West but really is being snapped up where we’re building it.
Susan Freeman
You mentioned Barking Riverside and which made me think of Darren Rodwell, the wonderful Leader of Barking and Dagenham who is doing a wonderful job of sort of bringing investment into his area and I think the last time you and I saw each other in real life was at the London Councils Housing Conference which in fact Darren invited me to and you were on the platform with the Late Tony Pidgley and it was, I mean, it was something that really stuck in my mind because he had brought along, and had on the panel with him, the Chairman of the Residents Association, I think at Woodberry Down and…
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Kidbrooke.
Susan Freeman
Kidbrooke. And I just thought, this makes so much sense, you know she’s the customer. We had so many of these housing conferences where the developers talked, local authorities might talk, then you just don’t hear from the customer and I was so struck, you know, by the relationship she had with Tony and, you know, the sort of mutual admiration and it just sort of seemed to be you know a really good example of a, you know, a developer listening and working with the people that lived there.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Yeah absolutely. I mean, gosh, Tony, I miss him, I used to have breakfast with him once a month and, yeah, I’m losing weight on the back of not having breakfast with Tony but I absolutely miss him. I first met Tony when I worked at Hammersmith & Fulham on the Imperial Wharf development and it’s been fascinating for me watching, I watched his and Berkeley Homes evolution. When I first him, he was building affordable housing blocks at Imperial Wharf where they weren’t allowed to have balconies because Tony was very worried that they would do things like hang inappropriate flags or hang their washing out or throw beer cans off the balconies, it was a very, very odd view of who lives in affordable housing and then by the time he got to Woodberry Down and to Kidbrooke, he had learnt an awful lot through working very closely with local authorities so what he was proposing at Woodberry Down and at Kidbrooke where L&Q are buying some of those homes there from Berkeley was so different and so much more engaged with real people who live on the estates. I think that woman’s personal journey from, you know, living on the Kidbrooke Estate, the what was it called, Ferrier Estate, having a home infested with red ants where she was worried about her children constantly, to here she is, she’s been empowered through this process, she has stepped up to Chair a Residents Association where if somebody had said to her twenty years ago this is where you’ll be, she wouldn’t have believed them and there she was in front of an audience of grim, dull professionals like us and, yeah, really, really stopped us all in our tracks. For exactly the reason you are saying, we all just, you know, we were in this little cocoon, happily talking to our, talking to ourselves really and there she was reminding us why regeneration, building new homes and doing it properly, is such an important thing. Oh, I loved it. I loved it. I felt sorry for her because Tony hadn’t told her he was going to put her up on stage.
Susan Freeman
You’re joking.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
But she was brilliant, she did brilliantly.
Susan Freeman
She was a natural and I remember, you know, she was saying that, you know, when they originally heard a developer, you know, was coming in, you know, they were all very negative about it and I don’t know what Tony and Berkeley, you know, did to win everybody round but it was… anyway it was a really interesting, you know, conference and I think something we should do more often if we can, actually you know, get the customers to come along and talk about it.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Just before this call, I was talking to our resident services board chair and group board member, Fayann Simpson who is absolutely amazing and she has been going to a lot of these sort of events talking to the professionals, the so-called professionals, and she is really starting to make an impact on exactly that, describing her personal journey as a resident of L&Q and what matters to her. She’s really been challenging me and challenging my team on the words we use, the language we use and how we can come across as just being very paternalistic and doing to them in a sort of feudal landlord kind of way rather than a modern Housing Association who wants to have a genuine co-production of a service model. She’s brilliant, she’s absolutely brilliant.
Susan Freeman
So what sort of things mustn’t you say?
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Well it’s things like we keep referring to ‘our homes’ and I still do it. We talk about ‘investing in our homes’ and she points out to me, “It’s not your home. It’s that resident’s home. You may own the physical building that they’re living in but it’s their home and what you’re doing is enabling them to make a home that they love and they feel safe in and they can bring up family in” and, yeah, it’s little things like that, it’s really, really interesting. So, we had a seminar with some of our senior leaders this morning to talk about our use of language in that sense and just to remind ourselves that, yeah, we don’t know all the answers and we shouldn’t be talking down to people and, yeah, brilliant.
Susan Freeman
It’s so easy to get it wrong. I know, I was pulled up by Tom Bloxham in one of the interviews because I was talking about housing units and he was saying, “Units? Not units? Homes.” So, you’ve talked, you know, in the past about the issues of being a woman in a male sector, also the issues of coming from an immigrant background so, do you think your career to date has been easier or more difficult by virtue of that, that you are different?
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
I think in the beginning, it was certainly more difficult, I had some horrible situations, particularly during the IRA bombing campaign that carried on, we forget this now but it carried on well into the 1990s and that was incredibly difficult because being Irish was, you know, it marked you out as being different and people made assumptions about you which were, you know, none of us should ever make assumptions about anybody but it was really, really difficult to deal with. Being a woman in construction, it took me a long time to actually realise that it was better not to be, not to try and out-lad the lads, just to actually be yourself, to bring your whole self to work and there was a wonderful woman, and you might remember her name Susan, called Sunny… was it Sunny Crouch?
Susan Freeman
Yeah.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Yeah, who worked… where did she work? She…
Susan Freeman
Worked with Saul Dennis.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
That’s it, yes. And she took me aside one day and she said, “Listen. Ditch the grey suits.” Yeah and she said, “Look around this room,” she said, “This is just a room of grey and blue suits,” you know, “wear yellow,” you know and I suddenly thought well, as yellow is my favourite colour, I love yellow, I love orange and I love bright colours and why am I trying to hide the fact that I am a woman so, yeah, the next time I met her I was in a very long mustard coat and she was right, it’s hard enough to be a woman so when you walk in and people will automatically turning to you and go, ooh, didn’t know quite what to say to me but at least I wasn’t, I didn’t have someone asking me to pour them the tea. So, yeah, being Irish and being a woman, it has been an interesting journey but it's also, you can let it get you down, you can let it get in the way or you can just go, well to hell with this, I know I’m good, I know what I’m doing, I’m just going to get on with it and also, as I say, not to out-lad the lads, you know, when I went through a phase working in construction where effing and blinding and shouting at people seemed to be the way things were done and I felt very uncomfortable doing it but, yeah, I gave that up after a couple of weeks. It was exhausting. You are playing a stupid part and, yes, it’s much, much easier just to be yourself but it is interesting now to be this senior and to look back on it and to give some advice on what I brought which was a different type of diversity, a cognitive diversity as much as anything else and it was always fun to watch British people try and place you because whatever we think about British society, class is still an issue and in Ireland, I don’t know how we’ve managed over it the decades since we moved away from Britain but we seem to have become very classless and it’s really quite hard to figure out because we have a very different education system and whatnot, it’s very hard to place me so I was an oddity in all sorts of ways.
Susan Freeman
People do like to be able to, you know, place somebody and pigeonhole them and it’s troubling for them when they can’t. So, your advice to a young woman coming into construction and real estate now would be, to be yourself or…?
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Be yourself. Yeah. And also be curious and volunteer for things. I got most of my big breaks in my career by volunteering to do random things that I knew nothing about. I once volunteered to implement a new IT system for a Housing Association. I knew nothing about IT. I still know nothing about IT but I know an awful lot about human nature on the back of that. You know, at Hackney I did things like I managed the mortuaries, I, yeah, no matter what it was, I’ve even been a shop steward, I was the shop steward for NALGO which was the trade union before UNISON. That was brilliant. It got me access to management. So, you got your face in front of the leaders of the organisation on a regular basis. They may not have liked what I was saying to them but at least I was in the room. So, yeah, just say yes to some really interesting opportunities.
Susan Freeman
I think I’ve gone through my career doing that and I have got myself into some very difficult situations and I’m sure you’ve felt the same, you are sitting there thinking why on earth did I put myself forward for this? So, no…
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Even that, you learn from it, you learn that well, you know, that doesn’t work for me, I’m not going to do that again.
Susan Freeman
No, it’s absolutely true. And I know that sort of one of the things that you have been leading at L&Q is sort of diversity and inclusion programme and you talked about cognitive diversity and I thought it might be useful to talk about what cognitive diversity is.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Yeah, it’s interesting so, sometimes I’ll sit in a meeting, it might be in L&Q, might be anywhere else, and look around the room and I’ll see women, I’ll see black faces, brown faces, I will see a lot of difference, then it strikes me, wow, they all went to public school, wow, they all went to Oxford or Cambridge so, wow, they all think the same way. So it looks as if we have a diverse group of people making, therefore making really good decisions. For me, it is about people who have had really different experiences in their lives, they help us make very different decisions so I have an amazing person who works for me in development who grew up on a Council estate in inner London and that person is absolutely fantastic when you want them to look at an estate regeneration programme or the design of a block. They are able to point out to me, “Well that’s not going to work because you know what’s going to happen behind that bin store” and I’ll say well I don’t actually, I’ve never lived on an estate. “Well this is going to happen” and their ability to connect with residents on the estates is fantastic and their ability to pull me up on decisions and say you know that’s silly, this might happen, have you thought of that but if we’ve all been to the same schools, it was, I don’t want to be political about this but it was my real beef with the Coalition Government of 2010 or whatever it was, there was, you know, what 90% of them had been to Eton. Well, they can’t be, that cannot be right. You’ve got to have people who’ve maybe lived on benefits, who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, who grew up with a single parent with addiction problems, who grew up in a different country with a different culture, who have a different religion, whatever it is, it isn’t just about the colour of your skin, it’s about your lived experience.
Susan Freeman
And just in terms of working with other developers, does L&Q work in joint venture, you know with other development companies and how do you choose the people that you want to work with?
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Yes. We’re very picky at L&Q but we have, at the moment we have about seven joint venture partners who are all absolutely brilliant. You know, they range from the big guys like Barratts to small really high quality people like Hill Group or Mount Anvil, we work with a tiny company in Erith called Andersons and, yeah, it’s brilliant for us because it’s not only about a joint venture and risk sharing, it’s about the transfer of knowledge both ways so, I think we have brought a lot of knowledge of how Housing Associations work and how you negotiate public sector funding arrangements for forward schemes, we’ve helped tremendously with that in the same way that my sales people and my development people have spent a lot of time with people like Barratts and Mount Anvil particularly, on sales and marketing. There’s an amazing woman who works for Mount Anvil called Lisa Walker who runs their sales and marketing who is just, she is on a different planet in terms of thinking about this and my team have got so much from working with her. So it’s more than just the financial and the risk sharing, it is, it’s a real transferred knowledge between both. I want to do more with those partners and with other partners, we have, you know we came in at the beginning of this conversation, we have a bit of a constraint on new business at the moment while we work our way through fire remediation and stock investment but really do want to talk to good partners about doing something interesting and innovative.
Susan Freeman
And I imagine, you know, you’re planning ahead over the next five years, the next ten years so…
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Yeah, you are right, these relationships take time. It isn’t just that somebody comes to se you on a Monday and by the following Friday you’re in some kind of an arrangement. I mean, Barking Riverside will be another decade, Greenwich Peninsular is the guts of a decade, we have to recognise that real estate is a long-term business and these partners that we have, you know, Barratts we’ve been working with for a decade so, you know, just because I have no money today doesn’t mean that you don’t start the conversation now.
Susan Freeman
Otherwise there’ll be nothing in the pipeline when you are ready to go full throttle. And I just wondered, with everything that we have seen over the last year, you know, with people working from home and now sort of rethinking how they want to live and work, is it sort of making you reconsider how you design your buildings or your communities or are you just going to sort of wait until things settle down a little bit to see how it pans out because at the moment we really don’t know.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
I think the first thing that I’d say is, I’m not convinced people are going to exit cities in the way that some commentators think. I think there will be some people who will go and not come back but I think we usually have enough demand in cities for that space to be filled. What we have been doing over the last few years anyway was trying to create flexible spaces in our homes for sale where we’ve created study space that can be used as a home gym or playroom and we’ve tried to give extra space as part of what we do. I think what is going to be interesting and we need to keep this conversation going with Government is, on the affordable housing side where you’re to minimise your costs really so that you can reach various viability tests with the public sector, you can’t, you aren’t allowed to put in a spare room because if that person moving in is on benefits for example, so everything is pared back but what we’ve seen during this last year is, trying to home-school and work at home for example, if you don’t have a little bit of extra space, it has been a nightmare and it has set kids’ educational attainment back, I would imagine and we will see that in future generations. So it's, I’m more worried about the public sector allowing a bit more space. What we are also continuing to do because this is very big for us, is look at access to open space and green space. We have been very vociferous in saying no to Section 106 deals that involve private playgrounds and private bits and segregated from the people in the affordable housing, that is not, that is not how cities work and it’s not how cities should work but we have been doing a lot of thinking and a lot of talking to people like Fayann from our Residents Board about how green space can be designed and accessible and used so that, I think that’s going to go higher up our agenda, definitely.
Susan Freeman
And what about the idea of having some like co-working space or flexible working space, you know, side-by-side with some of your residential space, is that something that you do?
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Yeah, we have a little bit of that, we have, we are always required to provide commercial space because it’s part of a tick box exercise for the planning process really, none of us have ever done it terribly successfully, I don’t class a Tesco Metro as activation of a ground floor, frankly. I think there’s a lot more scope for this and if look at the work I did in City Hall around the Outer London Fund in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008 when we pumped a lot of money into outer London town centres to try and get them rejuvenated. The pandemic has now done that in London and I am very interested to find out if it’s done it in Birmingham and Manchester, Bristol. My little part of South East London, we’ve had two coffee shops, a bakery, a butcher, all open during this period and the coffee shops here have queues outside them now at lunchtime in the same way that you used to queue outside Pret in town so, I think a little mixed economy of doing a little bit of work that isn’t necessarily in your home but it’s in your local urban centre, wherever that is, whether that’s you know Leytonstone or yeah Altrincham and then going to the office a couple of days a week, I think that does push you at some of this redundant retail space potentially being repurposed. Now it’s really, really difficult for planners to get their heads round that because they’re necessarily sort of living slightly behind the times because they really genuinely believe that there is a retail operator coming and that you just have to wait and you’ve got to stick to your policy and somebody will take that unit, that they’re not going to, they’re simply not going to, retail has been changing for well over a decade now. We saw that in work I did with Croydon on the Westfield shopping centre, we could see the writing on the wall long before Westfield were taken over that things were going to change.
Susan Freeman
So if some of the planners you know don’t get it and they’re holding out for retail and you’ve also got the problem of, you know, a lot of high streets, the like fragmented ownership so you haven’t got one major landlord that you know can have the vision and push things along, how are we going to rejuvenate some of these areas because people now seem to be more willing to use their local high street and town centre so it’s going to need some vision, some policy, you know somebody to sort of push it along and it’s not necessarily the Local Authority.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Well I don’t know if it needs as much policy, you know, I get really frustrated when somebody suggests, “Oh, let’s reform the planning system.” Oh, not again. I actually, I have more faith in local leadership than that because if you think about places like Shoreditch and Hoxton, there was no policy by Hackney to make that happen. In fact, and I probably the former Mayor of Hackney doesn’t want me to say this but there was actually a bit of a policy of standing back for a while, we kept an eye very closely on licenced premises because we didn’t want saturation and you’ve got to have more than nightclubs and pubs but everything else you know the small chi-chi shops, those little artisan food shops, all of that happened organically because actually what the public sector did was butt out and actually not impose too much of a planning policy on us and that really interested me. It’s happened as well in Hackney Wick where you know, who would have thought Hackney Wick was going to be a really sort of interesting, arts commune sort of area with fabulous bars. Nobody would have thought that and again there was a brilliant councillor in Hackney, Guy Nicholson who had the vision, at Cabinet level not Leader level, to just say no, do you know what, we’re just going to stand back, see what happens, you know, technically speaking five years ago, ten years ago when I was in Hackney, ooh fifteen years ago, we could have taken enforcement action against some of the uses but do you know what, they were interesting, they were kookie, they were you know it was starting to attract other people to come there, to go there, the area started to feel safe because there was a lot more footfall and just because the public sector stood back a bit and some leaders have that vision to gently steer and nudge the rudder rather than come in heavy-handedly with a pile of policies. I’m going to watch Croydon very carefully to see what happens next there. It’s an amazing town, you know, we keep saying it’s thirteen minutes from the centre of London but it’s just brilliant on its own, it’s yeah, so I’m really interested in what… when the Council recover from this latest crisis, what’s going to happen there.
Susan Freeman
Well that’s an interesting tip. So, I have, I just have a final, final question for you Fiona. If you do have any spare time, how do you spend it? I mean, from what your, you know, the way you are talking about everything that’s going on, I can’t imagine there is much spare time but…
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Yeah. I’m, we’re in the midst of interviewing for my replacement as Development Director so as soon as that person is in post, I hope I will have a bit more spare time. Well, it’s pre-pandemic and post-pandemic really. I have a ten year old son so any spare time I get, it generally focusses around him. I also, I’m a passionate walker, it’s been absolutely brilliant during lockdown because it’s been so quiet, I’ve been walking miles around London, you know, just heading… I live in Bromley and just heading out my front door and seeing where I end up, it has just been fascinating. Cooking and entertaining and I actually I got to entertain last week with five friends in the back garden, absolutely wonderful, I missed it so much. I’d almost forgotten what to do though. On the morning I was thinking, oh my gosh, wine, food, huh, usually you’d spend a week sort of planning a menu, you know, now it was kind of a rush round Tesco’s at the last minute. I’ve got out of practice.
Susan Freeman
I’m amazed that you had time, I mean I suppose, you know, I hadn’t thought about the fact that you are doing two jobs at the moment so…
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
Grim at the minute. The end is in sight.
Susan Freeman
Well, I hope you announce a new Development Director shortly and thank you, thank you so much for your time today.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith
You are very welcome. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Susan Freeman
A huge thank you to Fiona Fletcher-Smith for speaking so candidly about her role and the role of L&Q in providing housing with a purpose. 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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