Andrew Ludiman of King Sturge clearly Knows a Thing and I was pleased and flattered that, at a Conservative Party Conference fringe meeting no less, he singled out Paddington as an exemplar for partnership working for our Age of Austerity.
For years I have been meaning to write up the Paddington experience but there just are not enough hours in the day. Perhaps I'd better get a grip.
Adjacent land-owners in regeneration areas, said the Ludiman, should be stitched together with the panoply of the various powers of the relevant public sector agencies to form a robust partnership vehicle, fit to deliver real results in a joined-up fashion.
Well, needless to say, I like this a lot! A real lot! But it did take me back to the summer of 1997 when, having persuaded all eight landowners in Paddington to form up into a pack -somewhat assisted by the late great John Sienkiewicz from the Government Office for London threatening to call them all in to the Secretary of State if they didn't come quietly - I took my proposition in to Bill Roots (Remember him? Remember Sid Sporle?), the then Chief Executive of Westminster City Council.
What about it then, says I to Bill: would Westminster like to dance ? Would they join with me in forming a public sector-private sector partnership, pretty please ? (I did, of course, have my beady eye on the current Single Regeneration Budget spending round, SRB4 I think it was).
There was a pause. And a sucking in of teeth. And then these words that I have never forgotten: "Well, Jackie, you see we don't really do "partnerships" - you go away and have your own partnership and very good luck" (shortly after this, Westminster also disbanded its Regeneration Unit).
Well ! I was crushed ! My route to public sector funding had been snookered (we were ineligible without the local authority) but of course I picked myself up and went away to regroup.
You know, I think things would be different in this story were it to play out now. But, at the time, Bill Roots may have done us all a favour: of course I found other ways of funding the Paddington Regeneration Partnership and the resulting organisation was pretty light on its feet. It was also able to be a little less, shall we say, politically correct than it might otherwise have been, and we could be quite focused and honest about what we were trying a achieve.
Things seemed quite hard then but, in retrospect, they were pretty simple: the planning authority was Westminster (Conservative); the regional Planning Authority reporting to central government was Government Office for London (just newly New Labour).
The physical benefits (partcularly uplift in adjacent property values) of the new developments we pushed to the wards to the south (the Hyde Park Estate; Conservative) and the socio-economic benefits (jobs, training and such like) we pushed to the wards to the north (up the Harrow Road; Labour) and the landowners in the Paddington Regeneration Partnership sailed through the middle. It still took three years !
We negotiated permissions with Westminster and we did not get called in by GOL. Result ! A little later, when - in 2000 - the LDA, GLA, TfL, the Architecture and Urbanism Unit and whatever else-have-you was established, one of the developers (and I won't say which one) muttered darkly to me: "Good job we've got Paddington away, Jack, we wouldn't have stood an earthly with this lot on our case".
Thank you Mr Ludiman for recognising our partnership. I am glad. But the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.
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