“I think development at scale, particularly housing, is politically weaponised at a local level and I don’t think that helps either because that’s when it’s really easy to throw the like, oh you’re making profits or you’re holding a landbank or this, that and the other around us as a sector when actually, I feel quite insulted when that is said because the reality of it is, is I don’t want to sit on a site, I want to get it through planning and I want to bring it forward into development and invest my balance sheet to do that..”
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 Lynda Shillaw. Linda is the Chief Executive of Harworth Group, one of the UK’s leading land and property regeneration companies. Lynda has worked in the UK real estate sector for over thirty years in both London and the regions and prior to joining Harworth in 2020, held leadership roles at BT, the Co-op, Lloyds Banking Group and latterly, Manchester Airports Group. At Manchester Airports Group she was a Divisional CEO, responsible for their investment portfolio and development land bank, including its Airport City joint venture. Lynda is also Chair of the British Property Federation Regional Policy Board. So now we’re going to hear from Lynda Shillaw about her impressive and varies real estate career and what she’s focussing on right now at Harworth. Lynda, welcome, it’s great to speak to you this afternoon. Where are you at the moment?
Lynda Shillaw
I’m actually at home, Susan, we’ve had a, an old friend of my husband visiting from Australia so, dinner last night and a goodbye this morning.
Susan Freeman
Oh, nice short visit, that’s very good. So, let’s get straight in with how you fell into property by accident because that’s what I understand happened, you didn’t start off with the intention of going into real estate. Just tell us what happened and what set you off in the real estate direction.
Lynda Shillaw
So, I probably you know need to fess up right now so I am an accountant by background, by training and very much saw myself with a career in finance and back the days when I sort of first graduated and I ended up working in BT which is where I qualified and then met the man who is today my husband and I’ve often said in the past, it was love that brought me back to Leeds and it was actually that that meant I ended up property because that relocation, you know sort of from London back up to Leeds, I ended up in a finance job where I was responsible for building services for the North of England and basically, you know, sort of I came in literally at the bogs and basins end of property as an accountant but very early on realised that actually I was massively attracted to the operational side of what we did and actually sort of the fact that property gave me a real insight into how all parts of the business worked in a way that I had never had as a financial analyst sort of sitting in the centre doing product development which is sort of where I’d left to come back up to Leeds actually.
Susan Freeman
And were you concerned about going back to Leeds? You probably thought your career was going to be in London.
Lynda Shillaw
Yeah, I was hugely concerned because I graduated in the late ‘80s and that’s around the sort of time where most of the traditional industries in sort of Yorkshire, the part of England that sort of I grew up in were basically sort of starting to you know sort of really wane and so jobs in the mining industry which had been a big employer, the steel industry which had been a big employer, you know sort of and they were starting to sort of haemorrhage people as those industries started to, to collapse, which they ultimately did over the next few years and so, I was one of that generation you know that did get on my bike and absence of jobs in the North, but actually there were lots of jobs in London, you know there was a huge choice in London, much more affordable place to live back then, back in the sort of mid to late ‘80s and that’s what had taken me there and the glamour, the excitement, you know sort of living that London life as a young professional was absolutely fantastic so of course when I was moving back to a city that I had never lived in, my husband is from Leeds but I’d never lived in Leeds, I actually felt like my career was over, I was thinking like you know how is this going to work you know I’m going to do a job that I don’t really sort of know if I want to do or how long I’m going to want to do it for but like I say the rest is sort of history because in many ways it confounded my expectations, it made it easier to stand out funnily enough being in the North, I was instantly sort of far more senior, you know sort of relative to the people that I’d gone to work with, I’d gone in at quite a senior level, whereas in London I was actually quite a junior level because much of the group’s hierarchy was London based so I found it really easy to stand out and for the right reasons, you know sort of that got me noticed and meant that people sort of threw stuff at me and said like you know will you have a look at this, could you do that and it was just an amazing learning curve actually.
Susan Freeman
And were there obstacles in your way because you were a woman at that point in your career?
Lynda Shillaw
I think so but not necessarily all gender related, I mean what was quite interesting was, I was really young so I was in my mid to late twenties, I turned up you know sort of in a team that was really established and BT was an engineering business so a lot of the people that worked in the company were men and people of my grade were entitled to an office and what was really sort of hilarious was like you know an office wasn’t terribly forthcoming for me and I think part of that was not so much being female but also being really young, you know who’s this person that’s come up from London sort of to do X, Y and Z, you know sort of an, and there was an element of cautious hostility I think is how I would describe it at the beginning, so I basically was I think quite oblivious to it at first and I just went and sat with the rest of the team on the open plan floor, which actually meant I got to know everything because people tell you what’s wrong, they tell you what’s going on, they, they didn’t treat me like I was like you know sort one of the managers in the hierarchy and suddenly I started to understand an awful lot more about the business very, very rapidly and I used that to my advantage actually, so I used that to my advantage to reshape how we procured, to reshape you know sort of how the ordering system worked, to reshape management reporting, to develop systems that enabled us to do things faster and more cost-effectively and you know within really sort of relatively few months I had a massive grip on you know A what I walked into and some of the real challenges that that part of the business faced but B was being asked you know whether or not the work I’d done could be replicated nationally and that was just brilliant actually so they did give me an office pretty shortly after that, I think they decided if I had an office I might not cause them quite so much trouble but what I would say is, over time and not a long period of time, those people who you know sort of like I say probably been a little bit sort of cautiously hostile when I arrived, became a really great team and we worked well together, I went on to manage them all actually you know at one point as well and I really enjoyed working with, with all of them so, it’s like I say it’s not that typical story that I’m going to tell you off you know I was discriminated against and I didn’t get promoted, I think it was more actually, it was like I’d been beamed in from Mars and you know sort of people were really sort of quite cautious of what I was there to do.
Susan Freeman
That’s really interesting and how long did it take you to gravitate towards a real estate focussed role?
Lynda Shillaw
I would say about nine months so, going in as Financial Controller for part of the Building Services business and in those days, I mean it was a billion pound business, the bit of BT that I was running, and when I started to do this early work in terms of understanding the business, sitting with the teams, looking at how we could improve systems and processes, you sort of get drawn into sort of what’s happening on the ground and we had a restructure, so BT used to restructure virtually every eighteen months and I had a new, a new Managing Director actually who came into our part of the business, a gentleman called Roy Cole, to whom I will forever be grateful because I think when Roy came up, we’d been doing all this work and the zone manager and I sat with him on his first sort of trip around the sort of country and what he’d inherited and we told him a lot of truth actually, I remember sort of the zone manager sort of saying to me beforehand what do you think we should say because things were in a bit of a mess, I think it’s fair to say my finance predecessor had not been great and I said I think we just have to tell the truth because the reality of it is, is you know you can’t dress it up, we’re not going to be able to hide it but what we’ve got is a plan to resolve it and that was the start of a fantastic relationship for me with Roy who you know became a mentor, a sponsor and a real champion for me in the business and it was Roy who started to throw lots of other stuff at me, I ran the management services business for him which was like IT systems and procurement across you know the whole of the country for building services. I ran Scotland and the North, he said actually you know we’re going to sort of re-look at how we manage all of this, how do you feel about running Scotland and the North and I said oh that would be great, I’ll have a go at that, thank you very much, and, and, and actually sort of with Roy so there was never anything he, he’s often think you know somebody else was failing to do something, I’d either go and work alongside them or ultimately I’d find myself actually sort of managing it and running it and fixing it and that just made me get my hands dirty on the operational side of the business and I really started to realise how much I loved that above my passion for numbers and finance, which is still there but actually I wanted to be an MD not an FD.
Susan Freeman
So, you stayed at BT for eighteen years, is that?
Lynda Shillaw
Eighteen years, yeah, yeah.
Susan Freeman
So, they must have kept throwing interesting new, new things at you to keep you interested.
Lynda Shillaw
I think I had about ten jobs. I started my career with BT in audit, went into product development and pricing, moved up to sort of Leeds to do the financial controller’s job and then once I went operational, I did everything from running facilities management parts of the business as I’ve just described but then I went into asset management and I ran the telephone exchange portfolio nationally as part of that role, I was Commercial Director, I was Strategy Director, ultimately Property Director at BT and I just had an absolutely fantastic career there. It was a great environment to be in, it was fast paced, it was exciting, there was lots of transformation going on in the network, I had quite a big team of engineers working for me when I was Property Director because some of the work that we were doing was we were offloading the network from exchanges to release them for development, so a lot of our city centre exchanges were becoming redundant actually from a network perspective but obviously had huge value attached to them from a real estate perspective so, I had a team of about sort of 30-40 engineers who had built the access network and they were working for me dismantling it and it was, you know, I never felt inhibited actually in any way in BT until the point that really sort of led me to leave and that was like where do I go next so, at property director you’re probably sort of top 50 in the company, line of business board would have been sort of the next step for me but you know so I was being told actually through the talent management programme, which I’d been in from very early in my career, I was being told actually it’s probably another five years and three jobs and you’re going to have to go probably and do a stint abroad to get on a line of business board and I remember sort of thinking this is crazy, I’ve got a husband whose business is in Leeds, that’s what had brought us back here, at this point I’d got three young children and for me that, you know what was being described was out of the question in terms of a stint outside of the, of the country. I just really started to look at what other options were there and it was the Co-op which was another amazing move and amazing job actually.
Susan Freeman
So that was 2006 you moved to be Head of Property at the Co-op. Was it a very different culture? I mean, when you’ve been somewhere for eighteen years, it’s sort of, it is difficult to make a move because you’ve, you know effectively grown up in a particular organisation. Do you find it very different?
Lynda Shillaw
So, yes and no, I mean it’s a effectively sort of the Co-operative, you know they’re mutuals effectively, so very different but actually, equally are run you sort of to make profit so that they can re-invest in the communities that they serve and actually moving to the Co-op it was like a great big conglomerate you know so another business were property was a key part, you know at the time it was, after BT I think was one of the biggest real estate portfolios in the country and I was given property, land and farming actually in my portfolio, I became the MD of a business called Co-operative Estates which was the collection of all of those things and what I would say is I think I’d been there for about five or six weeks and I felt like I’d been there forever and that’s actually been a theme in a lot of the roles that I’ve had when I’ve moved company and some of that is about actually if you get it right, it should feel like that, culturally very strong, very ethical, very principled, again great people, I’ve not really worked in businesses where the people generally aren’t great people and you know sort of with a really wide portfolio to manage and some corporate functions again like procurement, I’ve tended to pick procurement up quite a lot actually sort of in my career and tasked to basically sort of help them to transform the real estate that they occupied as a business in the centre of Manchester so that was NOMA basically in the new Co-op HQ, you know was the scheme that sort of we brought forward to do that but then also look at what we could realise from the land and the farming business because we had thousands of acres of land and not all of it was like going to be farmed forever so, we brought some of that forward for wind farm development, you know we brought some of that forward for development for housing but in a very Co-op way, you know sort of really quite holistically planned and actually what would be delivered would have you know the skills, the, they were very ahead in terms of how they thought about energy production, how they thought about the environment and how all of that got integrated into the schemes. So that was again just a great business to be part of because it touched so much of society, I mean from the food business to the bank to the farming business to the pharmacy business, the funerals business so, it was a really sort of broad church and I suppose what it had in common with BT, strong culture and a really positive culture, great leadership actually in fairness, I worked with a really, really, really good leadership team but also for me it was that scale and complexity and I’m really drawn to that actually I think as a, it’s something that really floats my boat and it provides stimulation and interest I think that draws the best out in me.
Susan Freeman
So I’m, I just wondered so clearly like so much to really get into there and as you say, scale and complexity so, what made you decide to go into banking? So it was only four years at the Co-op wasn’t’ it and then Lloyds Banking Group, which was a completely new departure for you.
Lynda Shillaw
Yeah, probably one of my, initially I felt it was one of my madder moments. I wasn’t looking if I’m really honest with you, I wasn’t looking to leave the Co-op, I was approached by a head hunter because they had been searching for sometime for somebody to go into run the real estate lending business at Lloyds post-crash basically so, Richard Dakin had the bad book, you know he had the sort of the business support unit and then they wanted somebody to come in, not necessarily having been a career banker interestingly but somebody who really understood the industry to come in and head the real estate lending business and I thought, I’d flirted very early with my career when I went to BT I made a choice between what was then the Abbey National and BT and I was drawn to like the engineering company not the bank so, I was yeah quite flattered to be even considered for the role, went on and got the role and then probably my first few months I was thinking like what on earth have I done because this is bank’s really hard, I’d obviously sort of seen it from the other side but actually when you go into a totally different sector, totally different industry, yes real estate is common to everything that I’ve done at this point but you know sort of learning how banking processes work, how loans or services get underwritten, how to work, navigate through the credit process, how the bank’s models work and again you know whilst I went in post-crash there was still an awful lot of turmoil going on between the regulator, the government, the banks in the background and that was a feature probably for certainly the best part of the first couple of years that I was there so dealing with all of that whilst you are, and I was a really senior banker, I mean I was running you know when I went in, it was a £24 billion business so it wasn’t a small business so the learning curve was absolutely vertical but when I look back now, I mean like wow you know I did it, I survived it, I absolutely loved again working with a great team, it opened the opportunity to move to SWIP and run a real estate fund management business, you know, so that was absolutely again some brilliant opportunity for me but I learned when I was in the banking side of it that I had the who’s who of real estate companies as clients but I was living vicariously through their schemes because actually what I really learned is I liked being client side so actually the move to SWIP when it came up was one that I took because it took me back into you know sort of the client side of real estate which is where I think my home really was actually.
Susan Freeman
We’ll come back to taking up the Lloyds role because I find that quite fascinating and I you know something we have spoken about that you know people talk about why there aren’t more senior women in real estate and the point comes up you know women don’t have the confidence to go for something they don’t think that they are you know 100% on top of and that way you miss opportunities because if you don’t take something up because you’re not sure that you’re 100% ready for it, you are going to miss the opportunity to learn.
Lynda Shillaw
I think that’s right and I’ve always been really openminded to, well to learning, and I am an avid, I mean anybody who knows me, I read everything that sort of comes in front of me and I always have done so I think that level of curiosity, that level of like you know sort of, of almost like mental agility and flexibility is really I think sort of quite an important part of, of my DNA and was I daunted about going into banking? Absolutely, but you know sort of some of the best advice I’d ever had very early on in my career was like if a door opens, walk through it, you know it was a guy called Mike Armitage who ended up on our board and he was being interviewed before he left the sort of business and stepped down from the board and he, he’d joined the company as an engineer as many people had and he said actually you know sort of my career, like many of his ilk actually, had been quite stellar and he said that you know what happened was every time an opportunity door opened, I walked through it and sometimes there was like a flight of stairs ascending upwards and sometimes there was a great big hole and you fell down it but actually having the, the determination because there’s nothing, my experience is there’s nothing you can’t fix basically, sometimes you’ll get it wrong but generally there’s nothing that you can’t fix and if you are focussed and you’re motivated and you’re curious, actually you know some of those things are really sort of quite key to, to surviving like a challenge like walking into banking as the MD of one of the, one of the divisions never having been a banker and yeah, again, and people look at you and they think well why you and you know, I think that’s quite interesting you know, why have you been chosen, why haven’t we put another banker in charge? Lloyds at the time you know really wanted somebody who was from the industry, who understood real estate, having come through the trauma of the GFC basically so you know I wasn’t a totally crazy choice and having a finance background also sort of meant that I should be quite attuned to picking up a lot of what I was given to do and that was the case. Did I doubt myself at times? Hugely. Four of five months in, I said to my husband like what have I done because this was also a London-based job, you know so I’d, you know whilst we’d relocated to Leeds in the early ‘90s, I’d spent most of my career at BT, still based partly in London and actually Lloyds was a, was a full on you know London-based job so it took me back to London sort of four days a week and you know living away from my husband, from my young family, doing something that was really probably the hardest thing I’d ever done, from a learning curve perspective and when you’re very senior it, it’s quite lonely because you don’t have a ready sort of made necessarily cohort of people if you’re new into this that are going to support you through it. What I did have actually were lots of people around me who I would count as friends who had come up through the industry with who were great sounding boards and were very supportive to me, so that was massively important actually in getting me through the doubts that I had once I landed at Lloyds as to whether or not I could actually do it.
Susan Freeman
And I’m sure you appeared confident at all times because there’s no way you’re going to say that you doubt your ability to be in that role.
Lynda Shillaw
No, but you do, and like you know and the thing is that I questioned myself, I mean I’m really hard on myself because I’ll be sitting there thinking right you’re crazy when you look at all the stuff you have done so far like what’s causing the doubt and you know I just go back to, it’s quite an interesting time, you’re learning a new industry, you’re learning a whole set of, whole new language actually is what it feels like but the industry itself is still going through quite a lot of turmoil and uncertainty and Lloyds was like trying to work out at some point whether or not it was going to have a real estate lending book and how big it was going to be and you know sort of while all this was going on so, you’re dealing with like real uncertainty going on around you as well and the BT career, I think in particular prepared me well to deal with change. As I said earlier, we restructured every eighteen months so I was actually used to sort of organisational turmoil going on but you know sort of needless to say I, I just dug in and I used to come home and I used to journal at a times when I find, you know I’m needing to think things through, I often sort of would come back and I’d journal you know sort of what had worked really well in that day, like what I would have done differently, you know sort of what hadn’t happened or worked and why and I found that really, really helpful because and funnily enough because my daughter’s just moved into my flat in London so she’s kicked me out, I found the journal when I was packing up and when I was reading it, you know things I was journalling whilst at the time felt big, looked really insignificant today and so, so there’s not, there’s always context for all this, so me thinking like having doubts and actually in reality as you’ve just said, are massively different.
Susan Freeman
And how you did that being in London, husband in, in Leeds, three young children, I mean it must have been pretty hard, I mean you must have had quite a lot of help at home to actually make all this work.
Lynda Shillaw
Yeah, my husband, I mean when I, when the roles, the sort of roles I’ve done and particularly when they’re in a different like part of the country sort of have come up, it’s always been a two-person decision, not a one. I mean because he came, whilst he runs a small business today, a family business today, you know he came out of big corporate sort of background so he understands it and he’s always been brilliant, he’s always just said like if it makes you happy and you want to do it, do it and we’ll work it out. We had a nanny, I mean by the time I got to sort of two kids and like you know sort of it was impossible with them, one at school, like you know sort of one, one a baby, you know and me sort of doing what I was doing so, you know we bit the bullet and we hired a nanny who was with us for about eleven years so that made number three really much easier actually so we had that but also my husband you know doing bathtime, you know sort of and bedtimes for most of that time, doing the, I was very unreliable when it came to parents’ evenings for example, I tended towards maybe the concerts and stuff but parents’ evenings sometimes were just impossible for me to get to and Phil would field all of that and was asked on more than one occasion whether or not the mother was around they would say and he would just go oh she’s off running the country or something but you know it is quite, so I think that has to be a team effort, you know if one of you has got like that nutty, crazy level of job and you’re not in the same city most of the time, you can’t do that without a really strong support base at home actually and I’ve been incredibly fortunate, I’ve said this many times before and to have had that with my husband.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, sounds absolutely essential if you’re going to take on that sort of responsibility. So we’ll fast-forward a little bit because you mentioned Scottish Widows, I think that was sold to Aberdeen shortly after you got there so, and then Manchester Airports Group and then Town Centre Securities. Now, I think around about that time you thought that you might look at a pleural career and take on non-exec roles and I know you went onto the board of the Crown Estate and Vivid so, what then happened because obviously you then went back into a very full-on, fulltime CEO role at Harworth?
Lynda Shillaw
It’s a great question because when I took the job at TCS and it took me back to Leeds-based Propco and I was on the board of that business through my role, I’d always hankered to be Chief Exec of a PLC as a, as being quite young in my career I was thinking why can’t I do that, why can’t I be Chief Exec of a PLC and in taking the TCS role I’d accepted that wasn’t going to happen basically and you know I’d got myself back Leeds, I’d got the Board of the Crown Estate and Vivid as you say, at that point I thought well that’s it, I’ve sort of missed my chance, you know there’s not going to be anything really sort of out there for me to fulfil that sort of bit of my career and to be honest I was comfortable with that choice because it, you know the reality of it is I’ve had an amazing career up to that point you know so actually I got nothing to look back on and regret at all actually. There were things that if I hadn’t done them I probably would have regretted so that’s like you know the Lloyds job that we just talked about and it was during Covid and I got a call from a head hunter more than once actually, who said every time like you know sort of we talk to people about who could do this job, it’s your name that comes up and we’ve had it from multiple sources and in fairness, the first couple of times I actually said like no, I’m not interested, like you know when I step down from TCS I’m going to go pleural, you know that’s what I’ve decided and I’m going to give that a go to sort of see whether or not that floats my boat enough basically, and it coincided with my husband sort of winding himself sort of towards retirement as well and then in the background I’d started to look at Harworth, I sort of, I did know the name, I had met some of the senior people sort of on the circuit sort of before and the more I looked at, the more I thought oh this is like right up my street, I mean you know great big dirty land bank, you know headquartered in Rotherham which is about sort of twelve miles from where I grew up. What do they do? They do the stuff I really love, you know these big regeneration schemes of some of some of the things in my career that have given me the most pleasure actually and it’s Chief Exec job and I sort of had another conversation with the head hunter who was very persistent in fairness, and said okay I’ll look at it and then sort of started like so through Covid and a lot of it was done on Teams you know sort of to meet the Board, to get to know the Chairman who thankfully lives not a million miles away from me so we were able to meet socially distanced like in person a number of times and the rest is sort of history. I had to break it to my husband and say to him right, I’m really thinking about doing this, it’s like unfortunately it's like property heroin for me, it actually is, it’s like this you know this fact it’s got all this land and it’s a big regen business and it’s what I love and I said like what do you think and he gave me the answer he’s always given me that if it makes you happy, go and do it and again a little bit with that, the rest is history but it has to be, it has to be a joint decision because my time at Harworth is you know took away from him you know sort of some of the things that he had maybe been thinking that we might have been doing sooner rather than later but for one minute, I don’t regret it and it’s, it’s, this is an amazing business actually. And it’s my business, it’s great.
Susan Freeman
Andi have to say it does seem like the ideal role for you and I hadn’t realised that Harworth started off life as I think the property arm of UK Coal so, there really are some you know interesting brownfield sites to do exciting things with. I mean, what is the portfolio? How much land have you got there?
Lynda Shillaw
So we’ve got about 13,000 acres of land in over a hundred sites. They’re all at different stages of development so some of them are still in the land assembly stage, some of them are, we’re walking them through the planning process to get them allocated and then we’ll put the planning applications in and bring them forward, some of them we’re active on site developing today and the way our model works is we have a number of products but serviced land, so land with infrastructure and planning is a core product and in the resi space, we tend to sort of sell that in phases to housebuilders and they go and build on it. We will build through institutional investors the build to rent product or for housing associations, the affordable housing so we will deliver that using housebuilder contractors actually as Harworth. And then in the industrial and logistics space, we again will sell some service sort of land as part of some of the schemes, the schemes tend to be very sort of very large but equally you know sort of we’re focussed on building and actually building for owner occupiers and building to hold in our investment portfolio and building for institution investors so, so that development side is very skewed to industrial and logistics in terms of what we do. But we are doing this in some really like places that people, you know when the mining industry collapsed in particular, you know we’ve written these places off but we’ll be bringing forward like you know sort of a thousand plus homes you know the school, the community facilities, all of that actually sort of comes forward as part of our master plans for regeneration if it’s resi and if it’s employment because you know a number of, a significant number of sites are employment sites, we’ll build everything from relatively sort of small units for you know smaller businesses to startups through to big sheds for larger occupiers and trophy sites like the, so the site of Orgreave actually, the coking works and colliery is Waverley New Community where you’ll have over 3000 homes, we’re coming to the end of, of that actually, great big country park, 2.1+ million square feet of advance manufacturing where you’ve got the likes of Boeing and Maclaren and Rolls Royce and a whole cohort of sort of international occupiers and that’s a real jewel in the crown and we try to bring some of that magic dust to every site that we bring forward, they’re not all both housing and employment, they can be one or the other but actually we try to sort of bring our history, our legacy and our skills you know sort of to bear across all of the sites.
Susan Freeman
So, you must have pretty good relationships with the local authorities in the areas that you are developing in, I mean we hear a lot about the problems with the planning system, I mean do you find that it works relatively well or, or do we need to do things to improve it?
Lynda Shillaw
I mean the planning system, I’ve had a long career now in real estate and I don’t think the planning system has ever, ever been perfect if you’re a developer and you’re having to sort of bring schemes through. I think it’s got particularly sort of onerous and clunky in the last decade, if I’m honest with you, I think it’s got, it has definitely got worse not better but you know we work across about 41+ local authorities, an increasing number of mayoral combined authorities and at one point earlier this year it was like we were having a new mayor every week actually, but that’s really important because the mayors can take a view of a regional level actually of what’s needed and where it needs to go so that’s quite important to us and we work really closely with you know sort of the local authorities and the mayor teams. We are good at getting planning, you know we don’t assemble land on a wing and a prayer, we assemble land that we think is in the right place at some point in the future to you know to secure a consent and bring it forward for development so we are good at doing it, it takes a long time and it’s far more complicated than it ever used to be and you know because of a lot of the environmental considerations that now need to be addressed in a, in a planning consent, your local authority planning office is dealing with a much more sort of complex playing fields now in terms of being able to approve a scheme than they did historically and there are fewer of them. Whilst you might get, we might be seeing fewer big applications going for schemes, actually that resource is very, very constrained and the whole way the system works has conspired really to just slow things down, you know, we’ve got some optimism around the, I think the government in opposition really listened to the industry, feeding into them what was broken, what would hold them back on delivering their growth missions and the missions around housing and hopefully we’ll start to see sort of some of that come through the MPPF at consultation and what comes into law to speed things up but you know it does need additional resource and I would say more efficient processes and systems because in a lot of ways local authorities look at things differently, you know if you talk to half a dozen local authorities they’ll all treat biodiversity and net gain in a different way and that becomes really quite challenging when you’re developing over sort of multiple geographies, you know to deal with.
Susan Freeman
And do you find that they are suspicious of you as a developer that you know they just think developers are out to make money for themselves and not necessarily put anything back into the local community or are you because you’re known in the area obviously there’s sort of history going back many years, there is a better relationship?
Lynda Shillaw
I think you’ve got to work really hard at relationships and we’ve seen a lot of change at chief exec level, we’ve seen a lot of change at office level in local authorities, even over the last four years actually while I’ve been Chief Exec of Harworth so, you’ve got to constantly work out the relationship. There is always an element I think of distrust between the public sector and the private sector when it comes to some of the things that we do. As an industry, I think we as an industry have to work really hard to make sure that we are being very clear in communicating you know really effectively, you know the great good that we bring, I mean you know as industry we create things, we build places, you know sort of we invest billions and billions of pounds into the UK economy and our supply chains tend to be sort of very much based in the UK economy as well. So I think actually, you know sort of as an industry we need to continue to work hard and making sure we do the best job to show the value we demonstrate. I think development at scale, particularly housing, is, is politically weaponised at a local level and I don’t think that helps either because that’s when it’s really easy to throw the like oh you’re making profit or you’re holding a landbank or this that and the other around us as a sector when actually, I feel quite insulted when that is said because the reality of it is, is I don’t want to sit on a site, I want to get it through planning and I want to bring it forward into development and invest my balance sheet to do that, and you know sort of there’s a lot that stops us from doing that that is nothing to do with our profits, you know or returns that we expect to make or actually what we’re prepared to invest and you know we’ve got some great examples across our portfolio, I’m sure if you talk to other chief execs, they’ll say the same thing where you know we’ve handed 106 money over for example and that’s still not been spent and you know when you’re bringing forward any form of regeneration but particularly at scale, you know sort of you’ve got to have a nod to what infrastructure do you need, whether it’s highways, whether it’s rail, whether it’s power, you know whether it’s housing, I mean housing is part of infrastructure if you, you know it’s really hard to create 70,000 jobs in a place and no houses so, actually it needs to be thought of quite holistically and that’s the challenge that isn’t just, you know the planning system doesn’t necessarily sort of, can’t address effectively some of the time as well but if you’re going to have a piece of major new highway infrastructure, it’s not just about who’s funding it, it’s about, it can take them four years to get planning to do it, you know so, and so I think the whole mechanism for delivery at scale is actually really quite inefficient actually.
Susan Freeman
What do you think we could do to, to improve it because it just is such a big issue and it sort of doesn’t seem that there is anybody in government who is necessarily saying any one person who is responsible for making sure that you know we get the infrastructure that we need?
Lynda Shillaw
So, I think again, I think it is something that certainly in opposition, this government recognised, they talked a lot about convening and convening across departments and I think that’s massively important from a, an efficiency of spend perspective, making sure that you only spend the public’s, the taxpayers’ money once actually would be really great and it’s spent in the most effective way. The mayors I think are quite important her as well so if I think about the schemes that we’ve got in the northwest that are caught under Places for Everyone, we’re in a JV that has the Northern Gateway scheme in there and we’ve worked really closely as a JV but you know with the mayor and his team and the local authorities that the land sort of sits across two local authorities and their teams to basically sort of bring all of the people that we need to help that scheme be delivered successfully into the same room so, National Highways have been very much part of that process for example, the power companies are very much part of that process and I think that’s massive, government is informed because it is a nationally significant development, you know sort of Atom Valley and Northern Gateway in particular, you know sort of the mayors keep the government appraised of schemes like that that are going on in their geography and you know lots of mayoral authorities will have really sort of big things like that that they, that they want to see delivered. So I think the mayors are really important and their ability to convene, their ability to get the attention, you know sort of ministers. We had the same with Tracy Brabin and her team and Tom Riordan as then Chief Exec at Leeds City Council, you know sort of with the Microsoft deal at Skelton Grange, you know sort of that involved us convening everybody from National Grid to Network Rail and High Speed 2, you know a whole raft of government agencies who we needed to basically sort of make sure we had got solutions to any challenges that their particular role in delivering that site might have thrown up. So, that, that’s massive actually.
Susan Freeman
So, just for our listeners, the Microsoft deal, you sold land to Microsoft and they’re going to build a very large…
Lynda Shillaw
A hyperscale data centre so, and actually what’s amazing about that, so Skelton is a really great site, it’s a former power station site just on the edge of Leeds and you know we suspected that there was a lot of power capacity in the area, in the network and we started looking at this sort of well over two years ago to sort of ascertain what was there and then having ascertained that we felt it was there, we started to sort of market the site you know for, for data centre to see you know what interest we had because you’ve got to remember at the moment like London is the sort of capital you know for data centres you know sort of in, across the MEA actually I mean it is the place, it’s the standout place but the investors and sort of operators of data centres are starting to look further afield because of power challenges actually sort of you know constraints in the network and so this site sort of comes up and it's an incredible site from that perspective. We did not set out you know saying actually we’ve got to land a hyperscale or you know but that’s what came and you know Microsoft have invested in a couple of other sites you know sort of in the vicinity as well. You know, when you take something like that to talk to the Mayor and the Chief Exec of the City and you say actually look, you know we’ve got interest, we couldn’t tell them who it was because we were all NDA’d, we wanted to make sure that they would be supportive of us doing it, not everybody is supportive of data centres actually because they see them as, you know they’ll say they don’t deliver enough jobs and they consume a huge amount of power, now actually the point here is in a growing economy where you’ve got billions of dollars of inward investment coming in and it would be, you know with cutting edge technology, whatever they decide to do with it, that actually has to be good for an economic growth of a region and you know sort of the city and the Mayor and her team massively proactive in supporting us, you know sort of to knock all the obstacles out the way and progress that opportunity because they see that, I mean it puts Leeds on a par with capital cities around the world, you know which is typically where the hyperscalers go, so it’s massive for the city region and we think that Skelton site will have attracted over 4 billion of investment by the time we’ve you know it’s built out and that’s into the city region and that won’t just be buildings, that will be jobs, that will be sort of you know boost to the economy so, you know for us, it’s been a great thing for Harworth to be part of and we’re still doing all the site enabling works to hand the site over to Microsoft as we go through the next couple of years so the job’s not done yet but the reality of it is it’s a big gamechanger for the region that we operate in, as the AMP was actually in South Yorkshire and as Northern Gateway will be in the northwest actually.
Susan Freeman
It sounds as if there’s some pretty amazing projects ongoing and it, I think things are obviously going well because Harworth are now included in the FTSE 250 as of a month or so ago so, congratulations on that. And just, I mean hearing about you know all the different things that you’re involved with at Harworth, I’m just sort of wondering about the role and how different the role is as CEO of a quote company from the previous sort of quite diverse roles that you’ve had in the past and did everything that you had done before really equip you for the role that you have now?
Lynda Shillaw
I think I would say 85% yes so, BT incredible corporate education you know sort of and being in their talent programme for you know the whole of my career there, I just had amazing opportunities to go to the some of the best places in the world to receive that corporate education actually and they did train us to run businesses, I mean literally you know that was part of that process, it was part of how they developed their you know sort of from relatively junior sort of managers right through to the senior managers and I think actually I’m immensely grateful for you know sort of what BT provided me with by means of a corporate education on top of my professional qualifications actually and you know the things that, everything they threw at me was you know I’ve got a them through my career, most of the things I’ve managed have been really big you know so I was equipped to do that and you think why can’t I run a company, you know. I think the businesses such as you know when I was at MAG that enabled me to sort of take on non-exec roles and actually sort of be able to sit on other people’s boards which meant I’d sat on things like audit committees and RemCo’s, I was Senior Independent Director at Vivid. You know all of that actually gives you a board lens and that sort of comes into your toolkit. I think the thing that really prepares you so the bit that I was probably blindest on and had least experience of was actually managing and working with our investors, you know so as Chief Exec of a PLC, investors invest in the management team, you know that’s the team that they’ve got to put their faith in to basically deliver them the return, you know sort of on their, on their money and manage the risk and all of that and all that goes with it, come up with a strategy that’s a great strategy for the business, execute that strategy, make sure you’re managing risk return funding, make sure you’re attracting talent you know into your company so that you can basically do all the things that you said you were going to do and like I say that was probably all the mechanics of it I knew incredibly well but you now presenting half year results, interim results, running an investor roadshow, writing the materials, the messaging, running capital markets day, we’ve just done that this week, you know was all quite alien to me but also as Chief Exec, you know how you work with and manage your board as well and where you know some of those relationships, particularly the sort of Chief Exec and Chairman, Chief Exec and Senior Independent Director, you know needs to be really strong and really effective so, you know if you’d asked me like how much of my time I thought I was going to be spending on investor, on team, on industry, I probably at the beginning would have given you quite a different split. What I would say is like anything I’ve ever done, I’ve really loved that side of it, you know I mean it was new, it was very different, we have a wide range of investors in our, in our business and you know we’ve spent a day this week you know sort of walking round Skelton Grange and Gascoigne Interchange, two of our sites, with about sort of 45 of them and what’s great when you’re with your investors is like you know they will tell you whether or not they’re happy with what you’re doing basically. They will tell you whether or not they think your strategy is sane or not and actually you know sort of that level of validation and interaction is really important as a Chief Exec to make sure that you are basically shaping the company in the right way to deliver, you know sort of to meet their return expectations and that you’re doing it in a way that they’re happy with as well. So, I’ve absolutely loved that side of it actually and I really enjoy the time that we spend, me and my CFO normally spend of the time with the investors that we spend with the investors.
Susan Freeman
And I imagine if there was any part of the role that you weren’t familiar with, you picked it up pretty, pretty quickly.
Lynda Shillaw
We had to. You had to. I remember thinking I might have had because I had joined towards the end of the financial year, so I joined in November of 2020 which meant that my predecessor and the CFO you know in theory would have presented the results, actually Owen left the business at the end of the year so it was me and my CFO who did it and I thought I’d have like you know maybe a little bit more time but you know actually, there is something for getting to meet your key investors early on. They didn’t know me so remember because I hadn’t been a chief exec of a PLC before, I wasn’t a name that anybody, whilst I might have been known in the real estate sector pretty well but I wasn’t a name that a lot of the investors would have known so it’s really important like really early on to get in front of them, introduce yourself, let them get to know you but also talk to them about what you’re thinking about, why have you joined the business and what are you thinking about doing with it and establishing that relationship really early on is very important because you want your investors to remain supportive of you and of your company so, you don’t really get, when you step in as chief exec, you don’t get, there’s no honeymoon, it’s like you know you’re literally sort of straight into it.
Susan Freeman
A bit like going into government isn’t it.
Lynda Shillaw
Yeah, a bit actually. I think it might be easier than going into government actually and I wouldn’t say stepping into being chief exec is easy but actually, yeah, it’s a bit more manageable.
Susan Freeman
So, you know with the benefit of all your experience and all these years in different roles in real estate, what advice do you give to young people that you speak to who are just starting off their careers in, in real estate? Where should they start and what direction should they take because there are so many different roles?
Lynda Shillaw
Oh, I mean, I think ours is an incredible sector, I really do and I, again this goes back to sort of what we were talking about right at the beginning, you know, how effective are we as a sector at communicating just the breadth of opportunities, you know sort of I came in through a finance route, I’d done sort of you know banking, fund management, you know sort of asset management, you name it actually as I’ve on the road to be chief exec but you know you’ve got many different flavours of surveyors, you’ve got the guys in the supply chain who are on the trades, you’ve got you know sort of the architects, the planners, I mean if you think about the sort of range of roles I mean my advice to young people joining the sector is really simply you know, if I look at my own career, I’ve never found there’s been anywhere that I haven’t been able to sort of go should I have chosen to, I might have had to do some more technical qualifications for some of it but the reality of is, is there’s oodles of opportunity and actually I would say to people be curious, I would say to people like you know sort of put yourself forward for stuff actually, get involved, put yourself forward, don’t be frightened to talk to senior people in the team, my experience over the years is that the most senior people are often really, really willing to help and to, to sort of chat to people and spend time with them, you know sort of you’ve got to accept that sometimes it’s not going to go your way and it’s not so much failing, it’s actually how, how you fail. Again, my view is, is that you know sort of rarely is it an all-out fail, it just might not have been what you planned to do or the way you planned to do it and I think people need to be quite resilient and they need to think about that. Networks are massively important, they have been throughout my career actually, so get involved, I mean we’ve got organisations like the BPF, we’ve got you know Real Estate Balance, there’s a massive number of organisations that host things for young surveyors, you know that basically sort of provide opportunity for networking and that is massively important actually building that network because in a lot of ways whilst we’re a very diverse sector in terms of the range of jobs and careers that you can have, actually we’re also very a tightknit sector so those networks are important when it comes to, to people moving around. And I would also say don’t be afraid to try something that’s outside your skillset either, we’re seeing at Harworth, we’re not a very big company, there’s only 130 of us but we have seen over the last couple of years you know sort of a number of people move, in fact we’ve just had one of the finance team has moved to manage our investment portfolio for example so we’ve had people move from project management into development management, you know so we’re actually sort of seeing that we can move people from one discipline into another in our company and support them with the appropriate training and development so, if you look at my career I’ve taken opportunities that have come to really stretch me and give me sort of some different tools in the toolbox and I would actually advise you know sort of people in businesses you know that are at the start of their career to be quite openminded and not afraid to actually sort of step into something that doesn’t actually sort of quite look the shape that you wanted because the learning that comes out of that but often I just find the sense of satisfaction and fulfilment is absolutely massive actually.
Susan Freeman
I think that’s, that’s really good advice Lynda. So I think probably a good place to end, we could talk for a lot longer but that’s been so interesting, so thank you very much for your time.
Lynda Shillaw
Well thank you and I know for a long time I’d promised to do this so, so thank you Susan because again, a new challenge for me this stuff actually. Thank you very much.
Susan Freeman
Thank you, Lynda, for some great insights from a very wide ranging real estate career to date. Some very useful advice there, including on walking through that door even if you aren’t entirely sure what challenges you’re going to encounter on the other side. 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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