4 minute read
Sigma Strategic Land is thrilled to be in conversation today with Professor Samer Bagaeen who is also a Brighton and Hove Councillor, a post he has held since May 2019.
Samer is both a Chartered Town Planner (MRTPI) and Chartered Surveyor (RICS), having been a trustee of both the RTPI and the TCPA. Samer has successfully bridged the worlds of academia, politics, and the development industry, bringing unique insights with his cross-disciplinary mindset and experience.
Samer is currently the initiator and leader of the Town Planning programme at the University of Kent in the School of Architecture and Planning.
Samer has previously worked for 100 Resilient Cities (The Rockefeller Foundation) and as Director of Urban Studies at the National Resources Investment and Development Cooperation (Mawared) in Jordan with responsibility for master planning former military sites. Prior to that, he served as Training Programme and Master Plan Coordinator with the Welfare Association in Jerusalem. Samer brings both depth and breadth of city expertise, specifically in issues related to project design and working with partners, community planning, regional planning & regeneration, housing delivery, and national urban policy formulation. Samer is a prolific writer and some of his recent published works include Sustainable Regeneration of Former Military Sites (Routledge, 2016) and Beyond Gated Communities (Routledge 2015). With his own blog entitled ‘The Disruption Hall’, Samer is well placed to explore a wide range of themes that often challenge the status quo.
1. Sigma Strategic Land (SSL) is very grateful for you taking the time out of your busy schedule to discuss a number of key topics that are relevant to the development sector at the moment. What do you make of the recent Government announcement citing ‘the best housing delivery stats in over 20 years?
I suspect this is the announcement that refers to the number of dwellings where building work has started on site. This was published by MHCLG on June 30th and was 46,010 in January to March 2021. This is a 7 per cent increase on the previous quarter and is the highest number of quarterly starts since January to March 2007.
What we probably should be asking is how many of these homes (dwellings) came through the various channels (PD, etc.), and also what the regional variations look like in terms of starts vs completions. It appears that housing starts fell in most regions in England except for London, the North East, and Yorkshire and the Humber, and completions fell in all regions in the year to March 2021.
2. Clearly a more detailed picture of housing need and delivery is required then. On this, Britain’s population is ageing, and with the current under supply of purpose-built retirement housing, scaling up a retirement living sector is needed. What could this look like?
What we’ve got at the moment in most of our towns and cities are family homes owned outright by those aged 65+ and a swathe of young people in rented accommodation unable to access these
family homes for their own growing families. Local authorities appear to have lost the control of dwelling mix as far as the life stage modelling is concerned. The basic premise here is that
households of different ages will have different housing needs. What is therefore needed is a blueprint for growth that allowed the 65+ to downsize by moving out, thereby allowing the younger generation to move in. Where could the 65+ move into? Traditional development is not suitable so new models are needed.
What’s been proposed in some circles is a kind of purpose-designed, professionally managed buildings with a strong amenity offering in central urban locations (BTR-like for example). There is an argument that an aspirational Later Living model can offer this option for downsizers.
3. We see that you have been recently elected to the Design Council, many congratulations! From our understanding of the Design Council, it is an institution based in London which places design at the heart of developments. The newly refreshed Design Council expert Network is drawn from a network of over 400 professionals using their skills, expertise, and experience in the industry across the UK. How do you think the Design Council can assist SME housebuilders such as Sigma Strategic Land (SSL) to help respond to the Government’s ‘Building Better, Building Beautiful’ commission?
Thank you! The Design Council refreshed back in April its network of more than 400 built and natural environment experts who collectively embody the organisation’s commitment to make life better by design. We are a wide range of active leaders and change makers from various professions, backgrounds, and regions, and we are an essential part of Design Council’s role in delivering design advice and support services in the built and natural environment and beyond. That includes SME housebuilders.
A particular publication from the Design Council that might be of interest to the sector is a report we launched in April, the ‘Beyond net zero: a systemic design approach’. This document highlights pockets of excellent design practice and speaks of the need to scale these in order to deliver the broader change needed to address current complex social and environmental challenges. Working with SME housebuilders, who have a different model from the volume housebuilders, could just be the spark that is needed to prototype and then scale this kind of innovation.
We are funding scalable pilots in our DCMS funded work in the Thames Estuary. It can be done.
4. Wearing your different hat as Councillor for Brighton and Hove, how do you view the Government’s uplifted housing target for the city by 35% brought through the latest standard methodology? How do you see this playing out for the Authority and also in other urban centres where there is expected to be similar uplift?
This was the curse of the mutant algorithm (please see my blog on that in the Disruption Hall).
Back in December 2020, the government decided to retain the current method for calculating housing need and apply a 35% uplift to the number generated for the 20 largest cities in order to meet its target of delivering 300,000 homes in England per year. Brighton and Hove only just made the cut into the top 20.
Brighton and Hove is not meeting its housing targets at the moment. In fact, it hardly ever does! The target of 13,200 homes, over 20 years (2020-2030), set the bar at 660 a year. Since 2010, only one year had achieved this - 2015/2016. In fact, on average we’ve only achieved 481 homes a year.
People argue that this happens because we are a constrained city, between the sea and the South Downs National Park. My challenge to these is to ask what did you expect to happen when you set up a national park in the south east of England in an area already under pressure for more housing?
5. I’ve heard you talk about The Aquifer Partnership in Sussex. Could you tell us what that is?
The Partnership, or TAP, protects the precious water held beneath our feet in Sussex. TAP’s work is all about protecting the aquifer – which is where we get our drinking water from. You’ll know of course there are issues around the resilience of our water supply in Sussex and across the south east.
TAP is led by a partnership between the South Downs National Park Authority, Brighton & Hove City Council, Southern Water, and the Environment Agency. TAP is working on a wider urban programme alongside its rural work and is promoting and prototyping rainscapes and SuDS in schools.
6. This concept of ‘resilience’ is something that you have examined in depth throughout your career. Can you briefly describe what resilience means and how this concept could benefit SME housebuilders like Sigma Strategic Land?
Resilience is somewhat new to our urban lingo although it’s been used elsewhere since the early 1970s.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. It’s a familiar saying that continues to hold true, particularly when it comes to the resilience of critical infrastructure for the delivery of goods and services. Resilience is the ability of urban systems to survive, adapt and grow, no matter what acute shocks (earthquakes) or stresses (congestion) they face.
Cities are playing and will play a huge role in building resilience. Strengthening cities' capacity to deal with natural hazards is key, especially the resilience of the public transport system and vital city infrastructure such as hospitals and schools in the face of floods, cyclones, earthquakes. The resilience of the housing stock is a huge part of this and this is where SME housebuilders can contribute by spearheading innovation in how they design and build homes so that they are physically resilient (future proof) and contribute to the resilience of their environments.
7. Are there any interesting lessons learnt from your time with 100 Resilient Cities or during your masterplanning of a range of sites in the Middle East that would be of interest to the UK housebuilding sector?
Climate change is obviously pressing. Over the past 18 months, the private and public sectors have increased their commitments to achieving net zero carbon targets by 2050. Most G20 countries have pledged carbon neutrality by 2050 or 2070, but few have developed comprehensive infrastructure programmes to enable this transition. Furthermore, half of the infrastructure of 2050 is already built, under construction or being planned.
Infrastructure undoubtedly has the power to support the transition to net zero — the fields of energy and transportation provide clear examples of how this is possible. But the pathway to net zero for infrastructure must be pursued in housebuilding and retrofits with greater urgency and on a global basis if emissions targets are to be met. We need to build neutral now.
This is a huge agenda in the run up to the climate conference, COP26, in Glasgow later this year and many cities have jumped on the ‘race to resilience’ and ‘race to zero’ bandwagons. The housebuilding industry should do the same.
We should also of course think about our infrastructure as we build more houses. This is something I am working with the team at the Lower Thames Crossing on. Housebuilding has to go hand in hand.
8. How do you influence outcomes in big projects in the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) like the Lower Thames Crossing as an SME?
There certainly is a need for better engagement between the big projects in our part of the work and their nearest stakeholders. For this in particular, I would suggest contacting the team at the LTC directly. I have found them really helpful in that respect and willing to meet to explore support and collaboration.
MACE Group has also been contracted by the LTC to do something similar and have reached out to the sector in Kent and in south Essex. I suspect we need to widen this conversation a bit more and focus on developing skills for delivering the crossing and its infrastructure working with industry and with the further and higher education sectors. Things will of course look very different when the crossing opens at the end of the decade and technology will have moved on from where we are today. For one thing for example, the crossing will need to enable hydrogen powered vehicles to run through it and this is not possible at the moment in other tunnels such as Channel Tunnel. A change in approach and legislation is needed and this will be a pan-industry effort and should of course include SME housebuilders.
Image source: Highways England
9. Sigma Strategic Land (SSL) is keen to understand how you view the role of strategic planning from your different viewpoints and whether there is some common ground between them?
There are of course experts in this field who know more about both the history and the detail of this more than I do but, as someone who has to deal with housebuilding on my political patch, I suspect that what will happen is that Government will continue to set targets as they have indicated they want to do. What we have heard in recent days though from ministers is that these targets, and I suspect there are political drivers behind this, will be tested locally so expect a watering down of sorts.
10. Sigma Strategic Land very much appreciates your time and commitment to take part in our Q&A. What do you see as being the main challenges for the development sector over the coming year?
I suspect that one of the bigger challenges for SME housebuilders, in particular, will be taking advantage of the learning from the larger projects incorporating modular construction promoted by the likes of Homes England. Modular obviously works at scale so a challenge will be to explore and unpack how we can make it for an SME. It might mean consolidation in the SME sector so I suspect that some thinking about maintaining the identity and integrity of the sector in light of these challenges will be happening soon.
Thank you very much for your time and for this varied and thought-provoking discussion.
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