Planning for sustainability: Westminster's retrofit-first approach

“Win-win.” This is how Geoffrey Barraclough summarises the council’s “retrofit first” approach. We meet Westminster City Council’s Cabinet Member for Planning and Economic Development, in the heart of Covent Garden, and, at his suggestion, tour 90 Long Acre together. Northwood Investors is refurbishing and extending what has been described as “a landmark Richard Seifert Brutalist building”.

This “repositioned” building boasts excellent sustainability features, in line with the Council’s 2021 ambition to reach Net Zero carbon emissions across the city by 2040. Fully 80% of the existing structure is being retained, meaning that “embodied carbon is less than half that of an equivalent new build”. 

In addition to the clutch of operational carbon scheme awards (NABERS, BREEAM, etc) that “The Acre” is targeting, Cllr Barraclough points to other benefits of the refurb: “It delivers additional high-quality office space where we need it, in the Central Activity Zone (CAZ). It tidies up quite a hostile street frontage, so it's a much better neighbour to surrounding buildings and streetscape. It's got level access, so is genuinely accessible and provides some commercial use at the ground floor as well. [It is] even recycling the tiles for the floor from another building.”

In 2022, Westminster’s Labour group swept to power in a council that had been held by the Conservatives since its creation in 1964. Their manifesto manifesto included a pledge to deliver “a greener and cleaner city… placing the climate emergency at the centre of the Council’s work, by requiring low carbon developments”.

Barraclough explained that, with commercial buildings generating more than 70% of the city’s carbon emissions, offices are the focus for the council’s Net Zero ambition. Moreover, retrofitting commercial buildings is easier than retrofitting residential (“resi”) dwellings because the interests of commercial owners and occupiers are aligned.

“When we were on top of number 90 Long Acre,” he observed, “you see thousands of commercial buildings, predominantly heated by gas, predominantly poorly insulated. And that means that the occupants are wasting money, [and] the landlords are wasting money because they can get a higher rent with a higher spec.

The case for demolition?
 

Despite Westminster’s proposed “retrofit first” policy, Barraclough does not rule out new builds, even where they involve demolition. The poster-child for demolition and development in recent years has been Marks & Spencer’s (M&S) flagship store at Marble Arch, at the western end of Oxford Street.

The former (Conservative) Secretary of State, Michael Gove “called in” [chose to review] and then refused the scheme, partly because it would have involved the demolition of the Art Deco Orchard House but also because of the environmental impact of demolition. M&S took that decision to judicial review, which largely found in its favour. So, the ball is now back in the court of the new Secretary of State, Labour’s Angela Rayner.

Barraclough cannot hide his impatience at the saga. After all, his job title includes not just Planning but Economic Development.

Nonetheless, he and the Council have proposed new tests, both sustainability and public benefit, for any future proposed demolition.

Moreover, he is tilting the scales of retrofit and refurbishment in favour of sustainability. Westminster City Council has previously had a reputation for fiercely resisting changes that might spoil its 56 conservation areas, with residential mansard rooves a particular bugbear. Barraclough recognises that refurbishment and retrofitting to make buildings more sustainable can be eye-wateringly expensive. Moreover, if owners or developers cannot extend buildings as part of the refurb process, then they may be commercially unviable.

“For the first time,” he declares, “we're going to allow planning officers to balance sustainability and heritage. So, where we're getting a retrofit of an historic building, we are more willing now than previously to compromise on heritage. There's a limit to how far we can go, but we do want to make sure historic buildings have a future. We want to encourage people to invest in existing buildings, which is why we're going to be more relaxed about modest upwards extensions”. One of his limits is so-called “plastic” windows, which have disfigured thousands of Victorian buildings across the UK. “Sorry, no,” he insists, “No uPVC windows in conservation areas.”
 

Sustainable transport
 

Labour’s 2022 local election manifesto included a bold commitment to “move towards being a 15-minute city, where most resident needs can be reached within a quarter of an hour by foot or by bike”.

As regards office developments, this means that office buildings include cycle parking for staff and, ideally, visitors. In the case of retrofits, this means that basement car parks may be re-purposed for cycling, and for associated amenities such as bike repair areas, shower-rooms, clothes-drying areas, and lockers. Where visitor cycling parking isn’t provided on-site, Westminster tries to provide it on-street, as part of a programme of increasing provision of cycling hangars across the city.

Barraclough explained, “It’s a very slow and detailed process as we go through the regular schedule of remodelling junctions and doing public realm schemes whilst upgrading the cycle infrastructure and for pedestrians.”

Aldwych-Strand is one example of a re-modelling of a traffic bottle-neck at the eastern edge of Westminster, into a public plaza and garden outside St Mary le Strand Church. 

Barraclough now has Oxford Street, one of the most famous shopping streets in the world, in his sights. Again, remodelling the 1.8km long-street is a painstakingly slow process. But Barraclough insists that progress is being made. “It’s huge and we are working with the New West End Company and the landowners to reimagine it end-to-end: wider streets, more trees, 64 new pedestrian crossings, more places to sit down, toilets - there [is] a whole stack of things that we are doing there.”

Barraclough insists that the Council is “taking a very pragmatic approach.” His preference is for a “deliverable scheme so no “visions” here… we’ve worked very closely with the local residents to make sure they are onside, which they are. We’ve already begun with some of the enabling works in Fitzrovia.

We are already working on making Mortimer and Wigmore Streets two way. [This] will unwind the Fitzrovia gyratory which will mean that we have much shorter empty bus turning movements and we’ll have less traffic on the side streets and so on. “Barraclough has just gotten sign-off for Phase 3 design works for the Oxford Street from his Westminster cabinet colleagues, though he insists that construction works will only proceed when private sector partners have come through with their share of the costs.

Westminster: Your business capital?
 

The future of the office has caused soul-searching in Central Business Districts across the globe, and further east along the Thames from Westminster. The City of London, for example, came up with a new policy, Destination City. Shravan Joshi, Barraclough’s equivalent in the Square Mile, told Deloitte how he envisages a future for the financial capital that has a broader business base, and more hotels, culture and entertainment, than before the pandemic.

Barraclough is strikingly laissez-faire in his attitude to working patterns, perhaps with good reason: Westminster has been a beneficiary of post-Covid changes. Many companies with head-quarters in outer London and the Home Counties surrounding the metropolis, have shrunk and/or consolidated their offices and re-located to central London.

“They’ll come to the team meeting because there is stuff to do after work. Getting them to go to an office park on the outskirts of a nameless town on the outskirts will be more of a challenge.”

“I don’t believe it’s my job or the local authority’s job to tell employees or employers how to run their organisations and how many days to be in the office,” he continued. Or if they should be in the office or not. “That absolutely is not in our realm and I’m not going to lecture anybody on how they should be working”.

“Our job is to entice employers and great brands to set up within the centre of London, and we are putting a focus on that with work with London & Partners. We now have a concierge-type service for inward investment, guiding people through planning and licensing,” he added. “We’re [re-] launching it with a new brand called Your Business Capital, which is quite cool. For example, a new Malaysian steakhouse has been opened in Paddington by the queen of Malaysia. They hadn’t thought about setting up there before but that’s what we can do for them”.

If anything, Barraclough’s problems are those of success –rather than suffering from a dearth of visitors, the West End is crowded. “If you walk through the West End, it’s full of people working, shopping [and] enjoying the culture. I’m not sure we need to spend taxpayers’ money on enticing more people into the West End. There’s plenty of people in the West End.”

Moreover, while the proportion of time spent in the office may have fallen, the propensity of so-called TWT, (mid-week), office working makes it difficult for occupiers to reduce their footprint. “If your staff only come in three days a week, but they all come in on those same three days a week,” he says, “you need a desk for everybody, otherwise they can’t come in”.  

He adds, “There are not swathes of untenanted buildings [in Westminster]. Occupational levels for both office and retail are actually very high. Whether those offices are being used 24/7, I’d be surprised, but people are paying rent for them.”

One result is that Westminster has not experienced the sort of clamour for a switch from office to residential use seen in other boroughs, and other parts of the country, and which the Labour group anticipated in their own manifesto. He concedes. “I’m not sure that we’ve landed where we thought we would land during the pandemic.” On the contrary, Westminster doesn’t have a “crisis” of excess office space, “and we haven’t had, yet anyway, much demand for switching office to resi. Outside the CAZ area we’re getting one or two [applications for change of use], but it’s still generally seen as more financially lucrative to run an office as an office in our part of London.”
 

Slow plan
 

More generally, Barraclough expresses the same sort of frustration at how slow planning can be that developers have expressed to Deloitte in our bi-annual London Office Crane Survey, albeit his frustration is at how long it takes to change planning policy.

Barraclough has proposed a few key changes to Westminster’s 2019 City plan: increasing the proportions of social housing in residential development, retrofit-first, and laying out specific plans for four tricky sites. He will submit these to the Planning Inspector later this year.