Projects

The London Borough of Lambeth sought to establish a council-owned housing company to reach ambitious targets for building new social rented housing. PRD initially advised on organisational structuring, delivery strategy and programme management options; undertook extensive engagement and education with councillors, officers, and other stakeholders; liaised with tax, accounting, and legal advisors to test the robustness of the proposed structure against Homes for Lambeth’s (HfL) development goals; helped establish a company Board; and supported the Board to consider messaging and opportunities to meet wider council objectives.

Since Cabinet approved PRD’s recommendation to establish HfL as a wholly-owned company with a group structure and the detailed governance proposals, we have continued to support HfL at the Board, executive and wider stakeholder levels. With partners , PRD has carried out business and resource planning, co-ordinated legal advice on loans and financing, prepared documents for the Regulator of Social Housing, and developed agreements between the council and HfL.

Ealing is vital to London’s economy. The borough contains around 8% of the city’s designated industrial floorspace, which includes important activity ranging from high-tech manufacturing to logistics. Demand for industrial space has reached unprecedented levels. Ealing wanted to harness this to deliver maximum benefits for its residents.

Together with We Made That, PRD undertook two pieces of research: an Inclusive Economy baseline and an Industrial Workspace Audit. The process brought together a broad range of evidence to enable officers and politicians to think differently about the borough’s socioeconomic performance. This showed that despite perceptions of affluence, Ealing has a range of deeply embedded challenges, ranging from rising in-work poverty to a severe and disproportionate COVID-19 impact.

Industrious Ealing also evidenced significant market failures in the borough’s industrial land market that cannot be addressed through planning policy alone. Our recommendations proposed a coordinated and proactive response to these challenges encompassing the wider policy levers available to the council. Industrious Ealing will enable the borough to maximise and intensify its supply of industrial land whilst also addressing key social, economic, and environmental challenges.

PRD has an ongoing relationship with LB Newham across several workstreams. For example, we developed a comprehensive evidence base for the council’s inclusive economy strategy, which is formed around community wealth building principles. Community wealth building is an economic development approach that redirects wealth and the gains of economic growth back to local neighbourhoods and people.

In response to Covid-19, throughout which Newham’s residents were among the hardest-hit in the country, the council commissioned PRD to expand the strategy to a wider recovery and reorientation plan, which has formed the basis of the borough’s new Corporate Plan.

We have also undertaken research on the impacts of Covid-19 throughout Newham, supported development of a new affordable workspace programme, delivered data training for officers, established a measurement framework for the Corporate Plan and other strategies, and provided socioeconomic data to support masterplanning in areas including Stratford, Canning Town, and Custom House.

As part of the London Borough of Newham’s successful application to the government’s UK Community Renewal Fund, PRD and Useful Projects were commissioned to develop an overarching business case and delivery strategy for green economy initiatives in North Woolwich and Beckton.

Our work is underpinned by a strong evidence base, where we identify the existing social, economic and environmental challenges of the area. We used innovative concepts, such as the Doughnut Economics framework, and tools such as a high-level material flow analysis (MFA) to determine opportunities for green economic growth.

Our approach also included extensive stakeholder and community engagement. We conducted a series of 1-2-1 sessions with people in strategic and delivery organisations such as the GLA, ReLondon, Royal Docks, Albert Island and local education institutions. We also took a citizen-led approach for our community engagement to ensure we built on local capacity and that the people living, working, and studying in Beckton and North Woolwich informed the way forward.

The work has identified a clear vision for Beckton and North Woolwich as Newham’s pioneer for building a future economy that delivers for people and the planet, as well as a set of ‘catalytic’ and ‘enabling’ interventions which will support this evolution. The work will ultimately inform corporate decision making regarding future policy and investment across the borough.

The OPDC development area spans the boroughs of Hammersmith & Fulham, Brent and Ealing and is responsible for regenerating 950 hectares around Old Oak Common and the industrial Park Royal site. The project will bring 24,000 homes, 55,000 jobs, and a new HS2 station. Within Park Royal is a substantial element of the site. Covering around 500 hectares, it is London’s largest areas of designated Strategic Industrial Land (SIL). Its economy comprises over 35,000 jobs spread across around 2,000 businesses and contributes circa £2 billion economic output (GVA) per annum.

PRD has been involved in several studies and strategies for this area:

• We produced the What Works: Park Royal study to develop clear plans for industrial regeneration in Park Royal. The study advises how the economy can grow and evolve in response to Covid-19 and nearby non-industrial regeneration, with an explicit focus on providing new affordable workspace.
• We built a bespoke Industrial Funding Strategy to support the OPDC’s ambitions for industrial growth in Park Royal and Old Oak North, along with partners Newbridge Advisors and Gerald Eve. The IFS identifies spaces requiring investment and intensification, investment gaps, funding sources to meet needs/fill the gaps, and how OPDC and its partners can access the funding sources. Our team consulted with cross-sector stakeholders (including the core investor, developer and occupier market) to inform the strategy, which will directly drive how OPDC delivers regeneration.
• We developed a Socioeconomic Funding Strategy with Regeneris Consulting to identify sources such as the Apprenticeships Levy, domestic and European funding, business rate retention, and private investment that can be used for local social and economic initiatives.
• PRD team members have also worked on the OPDC’s Future Sectors Study, Food Sector Study, Regeneration Funding Study, and the Park Royal Intensification Study.

Working alongside and Atkins, Oxford City Council, Oxford County Council, Network Rail, and the Oxfordshire LEP, PRD is providing strategic property development, value capture, viability and delivery advice to inform and guide the updated masterplan for this globally important city gateway.

Drawing on our experience of harnessing infrastructure investment to drive wider benefits, our economic work in Oxford and our strong background in formulating delivery options and viability assessments, we are establishing a business case for adjacent station redevelopment and bringing delivery certainty to the project.

London’s Royal Docks is one of the city’s most substantial regeneration sites, with 15,000 homes and 40,000 jobs arriving in the next two decades. PRD team members have been involved with the Royal Docks for several years, helping establish an economic vision for the area and indicators of successful regeneration.

We are currently working with the Royal Docks Team—a partnership between the Greater London Authority and LB Newham—to create the Royal Docks Success Framework, which sets out a Theory of Change for regeneration. The Framework details practical monitoring and evaluation criteria for tracking the evolution of the area and understanding progress towards the success indicators/outcomes.

Establishing the foundations for a partnership approach to data collection has been an important element of the work. This has involved in-depth engagement with stakeholders across the area (including developers, anchors businesses and institutions, workspaces, public sector partners, and the community) to map the types of data and information that they hold which could contribute to the partnership, their appetite to share information, and their willingness to collaborate on new forms of social and economic research to respond to evidence gaps.

We also carried out a review of the Royal Docks Team’s delivery progress during its first two years, which has helped refine feasible delivery timescales and influenced decisions about how the Team will operate throughout the rest of the development process.

LB Southwark commissioned PRD to develop an economic evidence base for the borough as the first step towards establishing a new economic strategy. The evidence base centres on three core themes and the issues that cut across them:

• How fair is Southwark’s economy? (e.g. access to jobs, amenities, and services; income inequality; opportunities for young people)
• How green is Southwark’s economy? (e.g. economy-related emissions; green jobs; implications and equity of green growth)
• How resilient is Southwark’s economy? (e.g. resilience of sectors, residents, workers; climate resilience)

With a strong focus on issues of equity and addressing inequality, the evidence base uses a mix of ‘traditional’ ONS social and economic indicators (e.g. sector breakdowns, jobs and business growth, income) and non-governmental data that provides more nuance on inequality and communities, such as information from the Urban Health Index, Trust for London, Consumer Data Research Centre, Civic Strength Index, and emerging research on low carbon goods and services activities. To understand the spatial aspects of inequality across the borough, the evidence base uses numerous maps, which tend to highlight central Southwark as an area where inequality is particularly embedded and deep.

Alongside highly visual data analysis, we provided a series of decision points and considerations for each theme, intended to prompt LB Southwark on which approaches or focus areas may be most suitable for the new economic strategy.

PRD is working with the London Borough of Waltham Forest to support the findings of an independent Affordable Housing Commission. The council wanted external expert scrutiny to understand what it can do to accelerate the delivery of more genuinely affordable homes. PRD provided a wealth of contemporary evidence tracking the impact of development over the last decade to support the recommendations of the Commission. This combined a mix of granular data, which was then tested and validated through resident engagement.

Waltham Forest is one of the most rapidly changing boroughs in London, having the fastest house price growth since 2012. Using the London Planning Datahub, PRD identified the neighbourhoods within the borough that had seen the highest housing development over the last ten years. From this, we used the 2021 Census to compare differences between 2011 and 2021, showing how the borough’s demographics have changed and the contribution of new housing development towards these changes. The granularity of the Census enabled a detailed understanding of changes at development level in areas of highest housing growth. This provided deep insight into who had moved into new homes and the role that tenure (affordable vs market housing) played in these changes.

We supplemented this with a programme of in-depth engagement through focus groups in the areas that had seen the highest development, which helped to test the quantitative data and understand how local people were experiencing area change. Marrying good data with rich qualitative evidence provided a deep understanding of the role of development in the borough’s growth story over the last ten years combined with communities’ experience of rapid change.