Projects

Folkestone and Hythe District Council commissioned a multidisciplinary team, which included PRD, to develop a Place Plan for Folkestone town centre—a critical exercise to define the future role of the town centre following a year of Covid-19 related lockdowns and ongoing challenges facing the high street.

The Place Plan addresses themes such as public realm, employment, skills and training, investment, and transport. PRD developed the socioeconomic evidence base for the Place Plan as well as recommendations to enable business growth, economic development and long-term community participation.

Guided by the views of local people, the project team developed a ‘mission-driven’ approach with six missions to structure the actions of the Place Plan and galvanise external investors around shared goals. PRD helped develop these missions and identified specific outputs and outcomes against each one to enable the council to measure success and progress.

The Place Plan provides the council with a robust evidence base upon which to bid for central government regeneration funding and the ‘mission-driven’ approach has allowed external partners to see both what the council is doing and where their own investments can make contributions to the aims of the Place Plan.

Frome Gateway is an area of industrial land close to the centre of Bristol. It has a range of uses including community and cultural, industrial, manufacturing, warehousing, and retail activity. Bristol City Council re-designated the area from a Principal Industrial and Warehousing area to an Area of Growth and Opportunity. This reflects an ambition to have a denser and broader mix of uses, including new homes, workspace, retail and leisure. A Strategic Regeneration Framework is being developed to guide this change.

To support the Strategic Regeneration Framework, Bristol City Council commissioned PRD to develop an Employment Land and Skills Strategy for the area. The strategy will provide guidance on the level and nature of future employment space, ways to support existing businesses, and employment and skills approaches which will maximise the benefits for local communities. As part of this, PRD will develop scenarios promoting different growth sectors and levels of business retention as well as test viability of these.

The Strategy is underpinned by a thorough social and economic baseline which details the community, skills and employment, and local economic context of the area. Our approach to this included quantitative data collection and analysis, policy reviews and consultation with council stakeholders.

The Mayor of London’s Creative Enterprise Zones (CEZ) programme provides funding to places throughout the capital with an established or growing concentration of creative industries. Starting with six zones in 2018, the programme has grown to include 12 zones. To receive funding, each CEZ is required to establish a roster of activities the funding will support and a monitoring programme to assess impact.

In 2022, the GLA commissioned a consortium led by We Made That with support from PRD to review impact of the CEZ programme to date and provide tools to help CEZ monitor impact. PRD’s role was to collect data on jobs, businesses, business births and deaths, and turnover for each CEZ as well as a selection of comparator areas with robust creative activity. We collected data from UK Business Counts, Business Register & Employment Survey, and bespoke requests to ONS and provided a series of static graphs showing change in each area over time. We also aggregated the data into groups (e.g. all CEZ, CEZ by inception year, all comparators, London-wide) to allow for further benchmarking.

To help the CEZ monitor change in their area, we designed and programmed an interactive, publicly-accessible dashboard, providing ready-made, area-specific visualisations for job and business counts, business births and deaths, and turnover estimates. The dashboard is available here (takes ~10 seconds to load, best viewed on a desktop/laptop screen). We also generated a series of raw data spreadsheets and a Creative Enterprise Zones data repository on the GLA datastore for anyone looking to review the methodology or perform additional analysis using the data we collected.

In 2018, the GLA published its Cultural Infrastructure Map, providing locations of several typologies of cultural spaces across the city, such as cinemas, makerspaces, pubs, rehearsal spaces, and performance venues. In 2022, the GLA commissioned an update to the map and an assessment of how London’s cultural infrastructure landscape has changed over time, led by project partners We Made That.

To support the work, PRD used the 2022 data collected by We Made That and mapped where infrastructure opened or closed throughout the city. We visualised the magnitude of change, showing areas with high numbers of closures and few openings; high numbers of openings and few closures; and high numbers of both. This helped identify places in London that could be prioritised to safeguard against further losses of space or churn.

We also calculated infrastructure changes by different types of boundary, such as openings/closures within town centres, strategic industrial land, and opportunity areas, which included correlation analysis to review whether particular boundaries are associated with, or predictors of, higher rates of openings or closures.

The Mayor of London’s Social Integration Strategy recognises the importance of better evidence of what social integration means and how to measure it. Working with the Greater London Authority, PRD prepared guidance and tools for organisations to use when seeking to understand and measure social integration in places and projects

The Social Integration Toolkit is a world leader in city-specific integration measurement. It helps track specific impacts of policies and projects, improving planning and leading to better initiatives to support Londoners. It aims to help establish a better understanding of the circumstances of individuals and communities by focusing on three core themes: relationships, participation, and equality.

PRD is currently working with several clients to implement the toolkit on their own projects.

Our work on the toolkit builds on previous support PRD team members have provided to the GLA in developing measurement frameworks, such as the Good Growth Monitoring and  Evaluation Framework.

Download the Social Integration Toolkit

Comprising nine local authorities across the west midlands, the Greater Birmingham & Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership (GBSLEP) area is at the heart of the country and is one of its economic heavyweights. The region is experiencing strong growth and investment, from Levelling Up funds to HS2 to international companies taking advantage of great connectivity to the rest of the country.

GBSLEP commissioned PRD and We Made That to review workspace supply and demand throughout the LEP area, with a view to understanding gaps in the market. In particular, the study is attempting to uncover areas throughout the region where workspace demand is outpacing supply and which specific workspace typologies (e.g. manufacturing space, lab space, kitchens, offices) are most in need. Our team’s approach includes desk research on workspace throughout the region, market and sector analysis, and interviews with local authorities, workspace operators, and other stakeholders or property experts.

The work will result in two major outputs. First, a map of workspace across the region showing workspace typologies and other information will give potential tenants, operators, local authorities, and developers a new resource to aid in business and policy decisions. It will also help determine spatial gaps in workspace provision.

Second, a report with findings about what types of workspace are needed and where, analysis on the value and benefits of workspace for towns and cities, and bespoke recommendations will give the LEP and local authorities a starting point for making the case for and directing investment towards workspace.

LB Hackney commissioned PRD to establish an in-depth evidence base on Hoxton’s communities and economy with a view to informing future strategies, partnership working, delivery, and investment. The evidence drew on PRD’s detailed review of socioeconomic data and an extensive programme of community engagement to understand the lived experiences of residents, carried out with project partners Fluid.

Through this work, we helped LB Hackney understand perceptions on how the area is changing, local support networks and their capacities, the needs of residents and which areas need better support mechanisms, and how the council can work with partners to improve opportunities for residents.

Following this, PRD undertook a similar review focused on businesses in Shoreditch to review the effects of Covid-19. The two studies are directly supporting a new Action Plan for local investment.

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.

Limerick Colbert is a large regeneration site at the edge of Limerick city centre with capacity for more than 2500 homes and 112,500 m² of retail and workspace, which will support anticipated 50% population growth by 2040. For Ireland’s Land Development Agency, the site is an opportunity to set a standard for public development in the country.

Working as part of a multidisciplinary team of architects and planners, PRD supplied a socioeconomic baseline, reviewing local demographics, the current housing and employment space markets, and inward investment to inform a masterplan for Limerick Colbert.

To ensure the masterplan can be delivered on this complex, multi-landowner site, PRD co-ordinated a landowner workshop and developed a delivery strategy which sets out a proposed joint venture structure, financing options, and delivery priorities.

The GLA’s high streets data service brings together dynamic datasets to build a detailed picture of activity across the city’s 600+ high streets, 300+ designated town centres, and 60 Business Improvement Districts. It is intended to help people understand how activity on high streets is changing, initially in light of Covid-19 but also throughout ongoing recovery and the current cost of living and doing business crisis.

In 2020, PRD advised the GLA on relevant data to consider for the service and developed an outline structure for a London-wide, multi-stakeholder Data Partnership to guide the new data service. The GLA commissioned PRD for ongoing work with the data service. Throughout 2021 and 2022, this involved training new users, running group sessions for users on new data and analysis techniques, and promoting the data service. We also added capacity to the GLA for data analysis and insight. For example, we analysed and visualised seven years of vacancy data and trends for high street/town centre premises across London; performed cluster analysis on spending trendlines to identify different typologies of Covid-19 recovery and how those typologies link to high street characteristics; and provided fortnightly reports with maps and graphs showing Central London footfall and spending to support the Let’s Do London marketing campaign throughout 2021/2022.

In 2023, we are using the high streets data to research the foundational economy across London’s high streets and town centres to identify places where the foundational economy is or is not meeting the needs of local residents.

In 2020, PRD and project partners We Made That worked with Thanet District Council and the Margate Town Deal Board to develop a Town Investment Plan underpinned by extensive community engagement and a widespread desire to transform Margate into a town with a strong year-round economy.

The TIP charts a 10-year course of improvements for Margate, focusing on scaling Margate’s creative economy and skills through a new Creative Land Trust; tackling deep health inequalities by providing more wellbeing amenities linked to Margate’s coast; improving public realm and connectivity; and making Margate’s nationally-renowned heritage assets more sustainable and inclusive. It is underpinned by PRD’s extensive socioeconomic baseline to ensure interventions are targeted in areas that need them most.

PRD subsequently worked with partners to lay the groundwork for the Margate Creative Land Trust (MCLT), which now has a fully operational Board of Trustees. MCLT’s purpose is to safeguard sites for creative industries, mainly through purchasing property and taking headleases with a view to subletting at discounted rates. To assist MCLT with this process, we designed a property acquisition decision framework for MCLT to assess the suitability of potential properties for their portfolio. The framework sets out how MCLT can collect and analyse information on available sites, taking into account factors such as site size, price, condition and refurbishment needs, potential number of jobs, businesses, or creative activities it can support, and the extent to which the property’s end use can align with MCLT’s vision and aims.

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.