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 Laura Citron. Laura is CEO of London & Partners, the business growth and destination agency for London. She leads London & Partners in its mission to create economic growth that is resilient, sustainable and inclusive. Laura runs inward investment and trade for the capital, supporting thousands of innovative businesses to grow in London and internationally. She leads London’s tourism industry to develop it as a destination and win visitors and events, including the Let’s Do London campaign and Visit London. Laura is global advocate for London regularly appearing in the international media and events. Laura has been CEO of London & Partners since 2017, leading through both Brexit and Covid. Before that, she spent nearly a decade at global advertising agency WPP, where she was Managing Director of the Government and Public Sector Practice. So now we are going to hear from Laura Citron on the opportunities and challenges of leading investment into London and the new Opportunity London initiative. Welcome and good morning, Laura.
Laura Citron
Good morning, thank you so much for having me on the podcast.
Susan Freeman
You’ve been CEO of London & Partners for I think about six years now and before we talk a little bit about what London & Partners is and what it does, I think it would be really interesting to look at your career path. So, I believe you studied PPE at Oxford, you got a Masters in Economics, how did that take you to WPP at the start of your career?
Laura Citron
Well I ended up at WPP through a very unusual route. When I graduated, I worked in Brussels for a few years, I worked in Moscow for a few years and when I was in Moscow, I worked for a investor relations and corporate communications agency that WPP bought and acquired it. WPP was in those days hugely acquisitive and used to buy nearly an agency a week and then I moved back to London to look after my father who was very unwell and ended up going to work at WPP HQ where I worked directly for Sir Martin Sorrell, who was CEO at the time, for a few years and I could have done five MBAs and not learned what I learned following Martin around the world and sitting in all his meetings with him, which was a fascinating education and a real privilege and eye opener for me to be at the heart of a FTSE 100 global company, and from there went on within WPP to lead the global public sector practice so, looking after our clients that were governments and NGOs all over the world with a global team which was absolutely fascinating, working on everything from tourism campaigns to getting people to stop smoking to using their malaria nets to digitising tax returns so, you know, all the weird and wonderful things in between that use communications and marketing and digital to serve the public.
Susan Freeman
It sounds like an amazing way to learn, so did that take you to some interesting parts of the world?
Laura Citron
I’ve always loved working internationally and I’ve always done globally facing roles, it’s something that I really enjoy and by the time I left WPP I was leading a team that was based in all sorts of fascinating places from Nairobi to Delhi, Singapore, Sydney, Brussels, Washington DC, so it was great and it was fascinating to see how governments operated differently around the world and how their relationship with their citizens changes depending on where you are.
Susan Freeman
Sounds like an amazing learning experience and what then caused you to stop all that travelling and take up a different role?
Laura Citron
Well the honest answer is, I saw the job advertised on The Guardian, it popped up at me and I thought well I’d love to do that and I applied and I got the job, which never happens does it. But the reason that it appealed to me was, so I saw the role, it would have been about six or seven months after the Brexit referendum and I’m a lifelong Londoner, I was born here, I grew up here, and as someone who is a Londoner and had an international perspective, I felt that the next few years were probably going to be quite turbulent for us and so for me, the opportunity to serve my city and go into public service at that time particularly, really appealed. The other thing was that the leadership challenge appealed to me so, being the CEO of a stand-alone organisation is very different from being a managing director in a FTSE 100 business even because you really do your numbers but other people sort of worry about investor relations and whether the IT is working and those sorts of things, whereas when you’re CEO in a stand-alone organisation, you have the opportunity to set a culture and that for me was something that I thought would be fascinating.
Susan Freeman
It must have been, I mean starting that in what was it 2017 as you say, know it was going to be a turbulent time, was an incredible opportunity so I think it might be useful for our listeners to really know, you know, what London & Partners is, you know, what it does and why it’s needed.
Laura Citron
Well I’ll tell you about London & Partners today, which is probably quite different to what London & Partners was six years ago. So, London & Partners is the business and destination agency for London, which means that our mission is to create economic growth in London but not any growth, growth that is resilient and sustainable and inclusive and from a governance perspective, we are a social enterprise so we’re funded partly by grants from the Mayor and from the Governments, partly by our network of several hundred partners and partly by our own commercial ventures, so we run some commercial ventures and we reinvest all the profit into our work for London. We sit between the public and private sectors and we have to raise some of our own income as well as spending tax payer’s money and I think that, that creative tension and being a business ourselves is really important for our culture and how we operate.
So, what do we do and how do we grow the London economy? We work in four main bits of the London economy. The first is our high growth sectors, so our tech and innovation and IP driven sectors where we focus on helping high growth companies to scale, so we run inward investment and trade for London which means that I have teams in fifteen cities around the world who are London’s talent scouts if you like, spotting what’s the next big thing, what are the next companies that we think are really going to fly in those tech ecosystems, convincing them to expand into London and helping them to thrive when they get here and we do almost the reverse so we support London based companies in the growth sectors to expand internationally and become global players. And to support that we do a bunch of things to make London a better place to be an entrepreneur and an innovator so for example, London & Partners founded London Tech Week which celebrated its tenth anniversary this year which we now produce in partnership with Informa and Founders Forum. So that’s the growth sector, so that’s everything that’s like tech and life sciences and all that good stuff.
We’re also the destination agency for London which is a fancy way of saying a tourism board, so we’re responsible for attracting visitors and events into the city so we run Visit London, we ran the Let’s Do London campaign that some of your listeners may have seen and we’re the Convention Bureau, which means that our job is to bid on behalf of the city to host big events here, so it could be big sports or cultural events or it could also be big conventions and conferences, the sort of thing that would go into like ExCel or QE2. So that’s us as a destination agency. We have a new mandate to support London’s small businesses outside the growth sectors, so this is our local businesses in our high streets and our industrial estates that provide really important local employment and services and amenity to our local communities and later this year we will be going live with a new service to help those businesses get the support that they need.
And then finally and probably most relevance to your listeners in the built environment sector, Susan, together with the NLA, New London Architecture, we launched last year Opportunity London which is all about bringing institutional capital investment into real estate, energy and infrastructure in London and that was borne from this realisation that we have massive needs as a city, massive capital investment needs but nobody was in charge of saying how do we turn those needs into investable opportunities, how do we take them to market with long-term relationships with our really important strategic investors and how do we tell a story about London that’s really compelling? So, underpinning all those things we do is London’s global brand and reputation so we are also responsible for promoting London globally, if you like we’re like the international press office keeping up that kind of constant drumbeat of good news and positive stories and amplifying the fantastic things that happen here in international media, so that’s something that we do a lot of, like tomorrow morning I’m doing an interview for Schengen TV for example.
Susan Freeman
Just sounds like an amazing role and I’m going to come back to Opportunity London a little later in the conversation but you cover so many aspects of the things that are important to those of us that live and work in London and obviously we’re always rooting for London to be the place that people want to come to and the London Property Alliance’s recent Global Cities Survey you know shows, updated quite recently, shows that London is consistently a top city for direct foreign investment. What is it that attracts businesses and actually what are the downsides, you know, what are the things that you encounter when you’re trying to persuade businesses to come here rather than New York or Paris or anywhere else? What are the positives and what are the negatives?
Laura Citron
So you’re absolutely right, London is Number 1 European city for foreign direct investment. We really focus from a foreign direct investment perspective on young technology companies, so it’s what we call ‘greenfield investment’, it’s businesses that are coming into the UK market for the first time, often they’re coming into Europe or EMEA for the first time from the US or from Asia and those businesses tend to be tech or IP or innovation driven, they tend to still be run by their Founders, they have Founder CEOs and they tend to be privately owned and either venture capital or private equity backed. So that’s the broad sort of profile of who we’re talking about, just to be clear with your listeners you know we’re not talking about a global multinational moving its HQ or something like that, we’re really talking about those scale-up companies. What they look for and the reason they come to London, the number one is talent, they come because we have fantastic talent, they come for the customers, so if you’re a B2B business, London is the biggest density of headquarters and decisionmakers and buyers in Europe, one of the biggest in the world and if you sell to consumers, in London you have a population of 9 million people who are very fast adopters, we love new things, very digitally enabled, we’ll be quick to use your new app or whatever product it is you’re bringing to the market, so they come for the customer. They come for the capital, some of them. London obviously is a global pool of capital. European businesses in particular come to London to fundraise, so they will often come to London to fundraise their Series A or beyond from London based VC funds. That’s less the case for US businesses for example because they will tend to raise domestically because they have a big domestic pool of capital but capital matters and they come for the ecosystem, it’s very supportive, considered to have reasonably stable, stable regulation, our regulators like the Financial Conduct Authority have been very progressive in enabling innovation, particularly around fintech for example. They come because we’re very well connected, so that’s about transport, time zone, English language, English law etc. And often they come for the lifestyle and the values and I talk about this a lot because I think in the world of foreign direct investment, we tend to focus on the hard factors that I’ve just talked about and benchmarking this corporate tax rate against that corporate tax rate or whatever but these kinds of businesses are hugely human driven, those choices about where they go are driven by their Founders and it’s a personal choice and a lot of them come to London because they feel that they belong, they feel they’ll be accepted, they feel welcome and they feel that it’s a place that they can have a good life and you can’t overstate the importance of our values in driving foreign direct investment. A lot of our clients’ Founders are quite young because these are newer businesses that have been founded in the last five years or so and that generation of entrepreneurs in particular are often very mission driven. When they tell you about their business, the first thing they’ll tell you is not how money it’s going to make but how it’s going to change the world and so coming to a place that they feel cares about climate change and cares about inclusion and cares about diversity, really matters to them and really motivates them.
Susan Freeman
And those are the positives. Are their negatives? I mean, there must be things that sort of come up, I mean for instance you know we worry about the cost of housing and you’re talking about obviously younger people, younger workforces and London is quite expensive.
Laura Citron
Oh for sure there are downsides so, some businesses will talk to us about cost. The businesses that are very concerned about cost., for them London is usually not the right option so typically we’re talking to businesses who are very focussed on growing their top line because they’re trying to grow to scale and profitability so if they’re looking for a low cost destination we tend to tell them that London probably isn’t for them but access to talent is definitely a big one and so they will ask questions about visas, migration, talent pool but affordability of housing is an issue in quite a lot of the big cities that we would compete with so we’re not alone in facing a major, major housing challenge and the strength of our universities and the graduates that they produce remains a really, really big draw from a talent perspective. Sometimes they’ll ask regulation can be a barrier for some, a lot of our clients aren’t in hugely regulated sectors so post-Brexit is not such an issue for them but those particularly for example in life sciences that are in highly regulated sectors, London is no longer a place that you can access the European market under a single regulatory regime, so that can be a barrier. And the other thing is that it’s a very, very competitive environment, these companies are hugely attractive and they are courted very, very proactively, particularly by for example the Singaporeans, the Dutch and the Irish who will go for them and they offer massive incentives, we don’t offer them anything, we don’t offer them tax breaks, we don’t offer them grants, we don’t give them loans and they can get lots of freebies from lots of other people so the fact that London is still the Number 1 destination in Europe despite the fact that we’re not offering incentives, I think is a real testament to the underlying strength of the offer but I am not at all complacent, it is a really, really tough, competitive market out there and my teams are battling every day and working really hard, sweating blood and tears to get those wins in.
Susan Freeman
Interesting, and who do you regard, I mean for these you know young scale-up businesses, who at the moment is the sort of big competition for you or is it all of those places?
Laura Citron
It’s a good question. It depends a lot on what sector they’re in because they tend to be quite driven by where their sector clusters are but I would say within Europe it would be Amsterdam, Dublin to some extent Berlin or Lisbon for the lower cost destinations, less so Paris actually, to some extent Paris, and then internationally obviously New York, Singapore, Dubai is really coming up as a major competitor now with a lot of Indian businesses in particular putting their rest of world headquarters in Dubai and using Dubai as a basis to expand across the Middle East but also into Europe and globally, so it’s quite a diverse competitor set I think.
Susan Freeman
And has Brexit been a problem for you, has it made life more difficult?
Laura Citron
So Brexit is obviously another thing that businesses need to think about and it’s another challenge to overcome so it certainly has made things more complex but since the relationship stabilised, Windsor Framework, people have got used to understanding what the Brexit regulations mean in practice. Entrepreneurs are very good at overcoming barriers, that’s what they do for a living and I think Brexit is perceived as, there’s two aspects to Brexit, there’s the practical aspect, is this going to make it more expensive, does this mean I have to go through ‘X’ regulation, you know, does it mean I need to have two different legal centres because I can’t trade across Europe? That will obviously make people think and then there’s the more emotional aspect which I think certainly in the immediate aftermath of Brexit and in some markets continues, affects European investors who felt more negatively about London and the UK, who felt more negatively about whether they would be welcomed and you can see it in lots of research that perceptions of the UK fell specifically in northern European markets, that’s where it was felt most acutely, but there has been some recovery of that as time has passed.
Susan Freeman
And we hear a lot about levelling up and investment in the rest of the country but do you reckon enough is being done to promote London and investment into London or are we suffering because of the levelling up agenda?
Laura Citron
I don’t see levelling up a zero sum at all. It’s really important that across the UK we reduce regional inequalities. We’ll do that by growing the other regions of the UK, that’s good for everyone. I think London has to be a good capital, London is an incredible asset and a global platform and if you are a business in Manchester or in Cardiff, you should be able to use London as your springboard to grow because you can go there to raise capital, to access global customers, to exports and I think we need to do a better job of helping the rest of the UK take advantage of this incredible asset that they have on their doorstep, you know we’re working with entrepreneurs and businesses from Stockholm, from Tel Aviv, from Paris, from Lisbon, they all come to London to sell and to raise money and they don’t feel bad about it and they don’t have, and they think fantastic that London’s in Europe, I’m going to use that to benefit my business so, so I think we need to lean into being a good capital. It’s very rare that London competes with the rest of the UK for inward investment. If an investor is looking at coming into Europe, they’re not thinking shall I go to London or to Bristol, they’re thinking shall I go to London or to Amsterdam? So, I really think it’s important we don’t see this a zero sum and we can waste a lot of emotional energy fretting about levelling up and London needs to promote itself and do well as a capital for the UK.
Susan Freeman
And you mentioned life sciences at the beginning of the conversation and earlier this year London & Partners announced it was joining forces with MedCity which is the cluster organisation for London’s health and life sciences sector to work together to promote life sciences in London, I mean that sounds really exciting, I mean how does that work because we hear a lot about the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, you know for life sciences and you know we see that some is happening around London but what are you planning with MedCity?
Laura Citron
It is really exciting. So MedCity joined London & Partners and it’s fantastic because they’re real experts, like they’ve all got PhDs and all sorts of very, very clever things and life sciences is a sector probably unlike the other sectors we deal with where you really have to be an expert to have a credible, sensible conversation with an investor so it’s fantastic having that proper, deep sector knowledge. You’re absolutely right, the London landscape for life sciences has really changed in the last sort of five or ten years and we’ve gone from being this quite disparate, amorphous sector to being what I would describe as a cluster of clusters and we now have a group of quite distinctive life sciences clusters across the city, so we have one around the Knowledge Quarter in King’s Cross and Euston anchored around UCL, Welcome, Crick, we have the one at White City, we have the one at Sutton which specialised in cancer, we have an emerging one called SE1 on the Southbank between Guy’s and St Thomas’ emerging at White Chapel, exciting things happening in Stratford, Canary Wharf, Paddington, coming down the line for Canada Water as well. So I think the way that we understand our own sector and the way that we talk about it needs to change to reflect that new structure because our life sciences are now really happening within these tightknit innovation districts which are anchored by a university, usually by a university and a teaching hospital with big, multinational businesses and an ecosystem of smaller companies around them and that’s really powerful, it’s what they call you know the triple helix of innovation.
So the first thing that we’re doing having joined forces with MedCity is to write the life sciences proposition for London in partnership with all the key stakeholders so that work is ongoing now and the team is actively working with London’s, our universities and the NHS and our businesses and the key investors and the innovation districts and the London boroughs to say who are we now, today, as a life sciences sector, how do we compete globally, how do we stack up compared to Boston or Toronto, how do we work with Oxford and Cambridge and the other, and Manchester and the other key centres around the UK, what’s our story, what do we want to be famous for? So we’re working on that really actively now because until we have that story straight, we won’t be able to go out coherently into the market.
Susan Freeman
That’s so interesting and I mean one of things I wonder about is whether there are the right sights in London for life sciences because not many of like the existing offices where you know we’re looking at how we repurpose them, not many of them actually lend themselves well to conversion to life sciences.
Laura Citron
You’re right and this is a really interesting one where I think the market is a bit in flux so, roll back a couple of years, there was a desperate shortage of wet lab space and everyone was saying, “There’s no wet labs, no one can get a lab, that’s what’s holding back the growth of the sector.” Roll forward now, we’ve got a really big pipeline actually of wet lab development particularly the big development in Canary Wharf but there’s a bunch of other wet lab space that will be coming on stream and at the same time there’s been quite a big drop off in funding into early stage life sciences so I think we’re not yet sure exactly where that market is coming out and I know that there are experts in this sector, JLL does lots of work on this that are looking at where are we now in terms of supply and demand but you’re absolutely right that that has been a key issue and it’s one of the big constraints in Oxford and Cambridge as well, is that lack of space, it’s a really specialist space.
Susan Freeman
Well it’s really interesting to hear what’s going on in London and I mean that is something that’s really developed since you have been in your role at London & Partners because I think if you roll back six years, we weren’t talking about it that much in London.
Laura Citron
We weren’t and for us it was, it was always a sector but not one that we had focussed on in the way that we are now. I think partly it was the pandemic that made everyone suddenly realise how important life sciences is. We have fantastic universities and MedCity was founded by UCL, Kings and Imperial coming together which is what makes it so special, it’s what’s so unique about it is that it is a partnership of those, those key universities with Queen Mary’s as well and that academic strength combined with the fact that we’re a fantastic city to grow a business is what should give us the ingredients to be genuinely a global leader.
Susan Freeman
Now you mentioned the pandemic and of course you, you led London & Partners during the pandemic and you know during lockdown which must have been an incredibly challenging time because suddenly there were no visitors to London, you know everything was closed, nobody was working in central London, during that period and sort of coming through that period how did you and London & Partners work with other bodies to get business back to London and to get the visitors back to London?
Laura Citron
You’re right, it was, I mean it was horrendous for everyone and as an organisation that works in tourism and so many of our partners are hotels and attractions and leisure operators, I mean it really was the worst of times for a lot of those businesses and we felt it was really important at a time like that that we stepped forward and lead but it was really important that we do it in partnership and the tourism industry were absolutely phenomenal, so what had been a pretty fragmented, and I’ll be honest, a fragmented and fractious industry in London, the tourism sector, which wasn’t particularly coherent and good at working together, actually it showed you that what the power of a crisis sometimes in that everyone came together in this fantastic coalition under a structure which we called the London Tourism Recovery Board which was brilliantly led by Kate Nicholls, the CEO of UK Hospitality and Bernard Donoghue, the CEO of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, who chaired it, and with that group and with the Mayor we worked together to bring the visitors back so we ran the biggest international marketing campaign that we’ve ever done for London, which was really commissioned by the industry, our teams were working hand in hand, all those industry marketers and our marketing team were on weekly calls, what do we need to do, what’s the data saying, what does the campaign need to do? The Mayor put money in, dozens of businesses put money in, it was a genuine team effort and the results were phenomenal, there was a return on investment of 28 to 1 on that campaign so of every pound we spent, generated an extra £28 of spend from new businesses in the economy and almost more importantly, obviously that is really important but almost more important is the legacy in terms of how we work with the sector, it just feels so much more strategic and grown up now and I think they have been an example to many sectors in London about what civic leadership really looks like and how to pull together and work as a team and set aside their competing interests for the good of all.
Susan Freeman
It was really good to hear a positive coming out of the pandemic and how are we doing in terms of tourism recovering? Who is coming to London now, is it, are we more reliant now on UK visitors? Who is actually spending money?
Laura Citron
So, as of last month, we are back at our pre-pandemic visitor numbers and slightly above our pre-pandemic visitor spend and that’s really good news obviously because it means we’ve recovered but also what it shows us is that we’ve actually shifted in the way that we’ve been wanting to shift for a long time which is towards lower volume, higher value tourism, for many reasons that’s better, not least from a carbon perspective so I think that’s really positive. A lot of the recovery has been driven by the US. US visitors came back like nobody could have imagined the strength of the US recovery, it’s just been off the charts and it’s very heavily leisure, it’s not business visitors, it’s holidaymakers, they are coming in their droves and they are spending so much money and that’s partly driven by the exchange rate which has really helped but it’s also driven by their desire to travel, London being a safe and trusted place to go and just the strength of the offer and how well it resonates with those audiences. The group that isn’t back and was very important to us pre-pandemic, is the Chinese tourists so pre-pandemic they were our second biggest market and there are still very few Chinese visitors back but all of our market intelligence and all of the data and the forecasts suggests that they will start coming back really in the Spring we hope and by the end of 2024 I’d hope we see what looks like more like a recovery of Chinese visitors. So that’s the bit that we’re really missing at the moment.
Susan Freeman
I’m not surprised the American tourists are back and spending money having just been in New York, it is I mean just so expensive, I mean partly because of the exchange rate but it is expensive so it makes an awful lot of sense for the Americans to come and spend their money here and they’ve got all the European designers. How many jobs does the tourism industry account for?
Laura Citron
Ah, this is a much contested question Susan but we would usually say about 1 in 7 jobs in London rely on tourism and that’s because tourism isn’t necessarily a sector like others, it’s a driver of a lot of sectors, so it drives retail, it drives hospitality so pubs, restaurant, bars, hotels, it drives a lot of our cultural sector and what we really learned during Covid was that to have the worldclass culture we have, whether it’s our galleries, our theatres, really heavily relies on tourists so it’s the spend that underpins a lot of sectors that wouldn’t necessarily be viable at the scale they are if you didn’t have the tourists. So it is a hugely important industry for London.
Susan Freeman
And how important is the tax free shopping and is it really playing a part in discouraging some of the overseas visitors?
Laura Citron
So the industry groups would certainly say that it is and that’s the case that they’ve been advocating very hard to Treasury and Sadiq, the Mayor, has been very much supporting that view.
Susan Freeman
And I mean the West End does seem very busy, I mean actually trying to walk through Soho, China Town at night, I mean it just seems to be heaving.
Laura Citron
Try and get a table, you can’t get a table anywhere. It’s packed, it’s chocka.
Susan Freeman
It’s incredible. I mean is that consistent across you know central London or are there, are there areas that aren’t doing quite so well?
Laura Citron
You’re right, it is patchy and we all know that. So the West End is thriving and the key visitor destinations like the Southbank and Greenwich are doing well too. We know that footfall has been slower to return to the more office dominated areas like the Square Mile and Canary Wharf because of working from home.
Susan Freeman
And I know we’ve talked about the return to the office before and you picked me up on that and you said everyone except the real estate sector has stopped talking about it, is that right because obviously it’s something which is still very much a topic of conversation in real estate circles.
Laura Citron
Ah, I just like to be provocative don’t I. No, I think what’s happened over the last year or so is that my sense is that most businesses have come to terms with hybrid working as a reality and they’ve all made their own choices about what that means for them and where they’re going to land out and hybrid working or call structural home working is hitting some very specific industries and bits of London very, very hard, I recognise that so City and Canary Wharf commercial office, it’s a real issue. But we know that the West End is booming and prime office in the West End is off the charts so I think it’s important to understand where this does and doesn’t matter and where this is an issue that does and doesn’t resonate and certainly when I talk to Founders of tech companies and scaleups, they’re not really talking about this issue with nearly as much salience as they were a year ago, whereas when I talk to landlords in commercial office, they absolutely are.
Susan Freeman
We’ve also talked in the past about Oxford Street and I know you have sort of views on the way people focus so much on Oxford Street as being a sort of bellwether for what’s going on in the high street generally but were you involved with any of the schemes to attract new uses into Oxford Street?
Laura Citron
We were, so during the pandemic we got together with the New West End Company, Hearts of London Business Alliance, so the two businesses improving the district with Westminster City Council and with a consortium of the key West End developers and landowners and property owners to try to bring in innovative new ground floor occupiers. So our teams were looking around the world and we were running missions and all sorts of things, finding really cool new retail concepts and wacky museums and new immersive experiences and funky restaurant concepts and all kinds of stuff and that was really needed I think at the time when we were looking at very, very high vacancy rates in the West End but the recovery was so swift and so powerful that within a couple of years actually now, with a few exceptions it’s actually quite difficult to get a unit in the West End because it’s really quite full and so we, we worked with our partners and we chose to stop that programme because it just didn’t feel like it was needed anymore or certainly not in that, in that way. So I’m really excited about the West End and how it’s recovered and how it’s reinventing itself and I’m really excited about the new plans for Oxford Street that the New West End Company and Westminster City Council are pulling forward which I think could be really, really exciting.
Susan Freeman
And you have a London Tourism Vision 2030, I mean can you tell us sort of broadly what the goals are?
Laura Citron
So, when we were getting to the tail end of the pandemic and managing to have a little bit of headspace to get out of total crisis mode and into okay what do we do next mode, we got together with the industry and had a conversation that basically said sort of who do we want to be when we grow up? You know, Brexit has happened, Covid has happened and there’s a climate emergency. Well, that fundamentally changes the context for tourism in London, those three things, Brexit, Covid and climate and so we need to think again about what’s tourism for, what shape does our tourism need to take, what do we need to have a tourism sector that’s genuinely beneficial to London and so together with about a hundred different businesses in the industry, we wrote this Tourism Vision for London and what it says is, the most important thing we need to do is make London a brilliant experience, a brilliant experience for visitors and a brilliant experience for Londoners. Now that might sound bleedingly obvious, like what else would a tourism vision say but actually, the industry coming together to focus on experience rather than volume and value metrics is a really fundamental shift in the way that we think about ourselves, it’s very fundamental and the acknowledgment that if tourism isn’t benefitting Londoners, it won’t benefit from their long-term support, is also very fundamental and we’ve seen in cities like Amsterdam and Barcelona and Venice and Florence quite strong anti-tourist political movements and those, some of those cities are now actively restricting tourism numbers, that is their policy is to restrict and to cap and to reduce tourism numbers. Now London is geographically a much bigger city so we have a lot more space but we don’t want to get to that place and so it was really important that we think through how we grow our tourism economy in a way that’s good for Londoners too and that we acknowledge that what really drives commercial success in the sector is brilliant experiences, word of mouth is by far the most powerful channel and the most powerful reason why people choose to come to London. When people have a brilliant experience, they’re advocates, they tell everybody else and we get repeat visitors and London is a real repeat visitor type destination, so it matters that people have a great time and keep coming back and now, taking that vision, we’ve then taken that through to a strategy and last month we published the Visitor Experience Strategy for London that goes into a lot more detail, it really looks at London through the eyes of a visitor, using loads and loads of different data sets, like loads of TripAdvisor data and Google reviews and all sorts of things to say how does it feel to be a visitor to London, what is the experience, where is it brilliant, where the pain points, how do we need to make it better and that’s what we’re now going to be working on with the industry over the next few years that really sets our agenda from a destination management perspective for the next few years.
Susan Freeman
It sounds like another positive for the pandemic actually people coming together and looking at how you know the bigger picture looks, which probably wouldn’t have happened before.
Laura Citron
I totally agree, it prompted us to have conversations that we wouldn’t have had and for people to come round the table in a way that they weren’t before and people to really genuinely sort of step up and be fantastic, civic leaders.
Susan Freeman
So, at the beginning of the conversation you mentioned Opportunity London as a joint venture between London & Partners and New London Architecture which you know has the backing of the Mayor and London councils to turn London’s built environment into a pipeline of opportunities that people can invest in, I mean can you tell us a little bit more about Opportunity London and obviously you now have a new CEO, Jace Tyrrell, who has come back from Australia to lead Opportunity London so, what are you most looking forward to achieving?
Laura Citron
Well I’m so excited to have Jace back in Team London, we worked together really closely when he was at New West End Company and we’re so delighted that we lured him back from Sydney to lead Opportunity London.
Susan Freeman
I’m excited as well, I was actually very upset that he left us for Sydney so you know it’s really good news.
Laura Citron
It is. What am I most excited about? I think I’m excited that we’re filling a gap and everyone that we’ve spoken to about Opportunity London whether they are a political leader, someone in local council, a developer, an investor, an advisor, has said oh yeah, we really need that and for me that’s both reassuring and also really motivating and I think we’re trying to fill the three different gaps. One is about developing the product, so we know that we’ve got massive needs in London, we need to build housing, we need to do largescale retrofit, we need new wet labs as we’ve talked about, we have major regeneration schemes and lots of infrastructure needs. But how do we turn those needs into something that is investible by a major global institutional investor and to do that we need to have clear commercial models, we need to aggregate opportunities to a scale that we can take to an institutional investor, we need to have teams that are actually ready to deal with them, so there’s a lot of work to do in building that pipeline and I’m really excited about that because I think it can be transformational for us.
The second gap was around relationship management. A lot of what London & Partners does is client service. It’s about who are the people who are investing in our city and how do we make sure that they’re getting good service, it’s easy to navigate, they feel welcome and we haven’t been doing that for our institutional capital investors and it’s really important we do. So, Opportunity London will be that point of relation, long-term relationship management with our top 30’ish global investors, really important.
And then the third gap is around the storytelling. Why would you put your capital here? Why is London still an exciting place to be? Which asset classes are growing? Where, how should you be understanding them and how can you navigate what is we know a fragmented, complicated place to do business? And so, that’s pulling that whole story together and that’s one of the things that Jace and his team will be working on first, is building that proposition which we’ll launch for MIPIM in ’24.
Susan Freeman
Sounds really, really exciting and I’m looking forward to seeing how that all goes. And I mean what does success look like for Opportunity London?
Laura Citron
So, in the long-term, success looks like brokering capital investment into these really important asset classes where we have major needs as a city but we recognise that there might be some quite long lead times on those so, in the short run, I think having really strong investor engagement and investor relationships and dialogue is clearly a key leading indicator and maintaining that cross-party political support so what makes Opportunity London so unique is that it’s a partnership between the Mayor at London level, London councils very strongly cross-party support are two sort of political sponsors and Opportunity London are Darren Rodwell, Leader of Barking & Dagenham who leads on housing and Elizabeth Campbell, the Leader of Kensington & Chelsea who leads on economy and is the Vice Chair and she’s a Conservative, he’s Labour, and having that strong cross-party support really matters, The City of London Corporation and our consortium of private sector partners. In the very short run, success looks like raising enough money to keep going next year and let’s be clear, this is a public-private partnership, we need the private sector to step up and to fund and so if anyone’s listening to this and you think I want to be part of Team London, how can I contribute, this sounds brilliant, I want to give Jace and Laura my money, please do get in touch either with me or with Jace, you can find us on LinkedIn or the obvious ways and we’d love to talk, so that’s, that’s the really immediate, is we need to fundraise to keep going, we need to maintain that strong, strong political support without which this is pointless and then we need to get some really good wins under our belt.
Susan Freeman
I have to say, it’s great seeing all the London councils come together, it’s you know above politics, everybody’s working together to promote London so, it’s good news.
Laura Citron
It is. The team held a briefing last week for boroughs on Opportunity London and the development of the prospectus ahead of MIPIM, you know we had over 80 officers turned up so that’s way more than one per borough, there is real, genuine enthusiasm and engagement for this and we’re really grateful to the team at London Councils who’ve really championed it, to Darren and Elizabeth who’ve been fantastic in bringing that strong support.
Susan Freeman
You spoke on a panel at a recent London Property Alliance event and you mentioned the American Inflation Reduction Act which was going to really put more pressure on us in competing with the US, what do you think we need to do in order to compete with that or is it just sort of off the table so you know as you said earlier in the conversation, we’re not offering things that other jurisdictions are offering, people come because they want to invest in London.
Laura Citron
Ooh, it’s a really good question, I mean the Inflation Reduction Act is a total gamechanger for the US and particularly for manufacturing in the US and for green economy. It would be fantastic to have a major investment stimulus for our green economy but I think we also have to recognise the fiscal constraints that we’re in and that any government after a general election would be in. I try and really focus on the things where we can make a difference. You know what’s that, there’s that prayer that says give me the wisdom to understand what I can change and the, I’m not talking any sense, you know what I mean, Susan?
Susan Freeman
I know what you mean, I couldn’t possibly give you the missing parts of it but basically focus on the things that you can control.
Laura Citron
Exactly. Thank you, that’s a much better way of putting it. Focus on the things that you can control and that’s where really putting our energies into things like Opportunity London. What can we do as a city regardless of what happens at central Government level to get ourselves organised, to tell our own story, to create the right partnerships within the city and control the things that we can control. How can I make London & Partners working with industry better at telling our story? How can we offer better client service? How can we work with the tourism industry to make a better visitor experience? All of these things are within our gift and I think it’s very easy, particularly during a politically turbulent time, let’s be polite, to focus on all the negative things that are happening in the macro context and all the things that we can’t control and we can put a lot of our civic energy into lobbying the Government about all the things that we want them to do. And yes of course it matters what they do but I think we also need to really direct our energies to the things that we can just fix ourselves as a city and take control and take responsibility for ourselves.
Susan Freeman
I think that’s a very good way of looking at it because I think there has been a little bit too much centralisation waiting for you know the Government to take the lead and as you say, there are certain things we can control.
Now, I want to ask you how you manage to combine a very demanding role with being a parent and as I understand it, when you first joined London & Partners as CEO, you were pregnant and were about to go on maternity leave, so how on earth do you make all these moving parts work?
Laura Citron
That’s a good question. Yeah, when I started as CEO of London & Partners I was five months pregnant so I worked for three months and then went on maternity leave for six and came back again and had another baby a few years later, so I have two daughters, they are six and two and a half and mostly very, very sweet and lovely, except when they’re not, like all children. I think I’m very lucky that London & Partners has always had a culture that is hugely supportive and inclusive and that day when I came in and said hello, I’m the new CEO and I’m pregnant and I’m going on maternity leave, the organisation could have really rejected me and they didn’t, they really embraced me and supported me and I think that’s made a massive difference to me personally and Deputy Mayor for Business, Rajesh Agrawal, who is my Chair and Sadiq, the Mayor, have been so supportive of me personally and I can’t thank them enough for that. I’m also very lucky to have a fantastic partner and husband who is a brilliant dad and we are genuinely very equal co-parents and the lucky thing about both being Londoners is that we also have grandparents who are around and who help and we’re lucky enough to have a spare room so we have a student au pair who lives with us and helps with the kids also so, I’m lucky because I’m able to surround myself with support that makes a massive difference. But it’s not easy and I’m not going to sit here and pretend that it’s easy and dreamy all the time, you have to make a lot of choices and I think I’ve got better over time about making the choices and beating myself up less about them.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, well it, it sounds fantastic, I don’t know how you do it and I could ask you how you spend your time when you aren’t working but I imagine that you spend an awful lot of time with your daughters.
Laura Citron
I spend time with my daughters and family, I love going to the theatre, highly recommend Clyde’s at the Donmar, I saw that this week, love eating, whether it’s cooking it or going to a restaurant, I absolutely love eating, I’m lucky that my extended family mostly live in London too but I also go to lots and lots of events which is such a privilege and one of the great things about this role is I get invited to all sorts of wonderful things which is just fab, I love getting out and about in London, discovering new places I haven’t been to before, there’s always something new to see.
Susan Freeman
That’s true. Well Laura, thank you so much and keep up the good work, that’s all I can say.
Laura Citron
Thank you so much Susan, really lovely to chat to you as ever and thanks for everything that you do as well to support the sector and you’ve been such a champion of Opportunity London since the beginning and we really, really appreciate it.
Susan Freeman
Thank you, Laura. Exciting times for London and we’ll watch with interest as Opportunity London drives new investment into London’s regeneration opportunities. And what an inspiring role model, combining a high profile and challenging career with bringing up two young children.
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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