August 2009 Archives

 Good story in Building today about the Olympic Delivery Authority's decision to bring in a consultant to review the amount it has being paying CLM, its delivery partner for the 2012 Olympic Games build works.
A few eyebrows were raised in July when the ODA's accounts revealed CLM had been paid £151m in year to March for essentially working how to keep costs down.

Mayor of London Boris Johnson has for the first time used new planning powers to call in a major planning application.

Commercial Estates Group' plans for the 63 storey Columbus Tower - on the site of Hertsmere House in Canary Wharf - were thrown out by Tower Hamlets on 4 August.

CEG, the property company of Swedish magnate Gerard Versteegh - ranked 111th in the Estates Gazette Rich List 2008, with a £200m fortune - proposed 315,000 sq ft of offices, a 192-room hotel and over 70 apartments.

Today the mayor said for that the first time he was to excercise his new powers to reconsider the scheme.

The Mayor said: "This is a decision I have not taken lightly. However the Columbus Tower proposal clearly meets the test of a planning application of major significance to the whole of London.

Australian shopping centre giant Westfield's results this morning provided little in the way of an update on progress at the Stratford City shopping centre, but what little there was proved encouraging.
The group posted an A$925m (£474m) pre-tax loss in the six months ended 30 June thanks mainly to an A$2.5bn (£1.28bn) reduction in the value of the group's property portfolio. Operating profit during the period increased by 18.1% to A$1.4bn (£717m).
At Stratford, Westfield said it was receiving strong interest in its "speciality stores" at the development and that much of that was coming from major tenants at its Westfield London store.

A quick one here to suggest that any one looking for a full, up-to-date description of where plans for the media centre currently heading should go to this useful recent posting on Hackney council's website.

It seems that Mayor Jules Pipe (pictured) is comfortable at present with the commitment within the design to a building capable of creating a creative industries hub post-Games. And that has to be good news for all the local residents fearful that the structure will be almost entirely demolished after the event.

Athletes' Village builder Lend Lease's full-year results this morning were rounded off with a management slide show tagged "Cautious but Confident".
It's hardly a surprise given the way that the business has extricated itself wisely from risky equity positions on major property developments while picking up lucrative fee paying contracts on building out schemes - most notably of course on the Athletes' Village.
The group saw a 29% fall in operating profit to A$307.5m (£154m) in the year to 30 June, hit by writedowns and a failure to meet its asset sales targets. It reported writedowns of A$179.3m for the second half.
On the plus side however its European contract management and construction business saw profits rise to A$39m from A$21m, with the key contributors the Athletes' Village, Media City and BP Global Alliance.
All of which brings me to the most interesting and confusing line Olympics-wise. Lend Lease was of course selected as development partner, not just for the Athletes' Village, but for all of the post Olympics work on the giant Stratford City site.
I reported around about this time last year that London & Continental Railways would drop Lend Lease as its development partner on the remainder if it does not produce funding by a July 2010 deadline.
Lend Lease signed up to build 1,500 homes, more than 1m sq ft of offices and 400,000 sq ft of retail and leisure on this part of the 130-acre site.
Clearly earlier this year Lend Lease was unable to reach agreement on financing the athletes' village. Here is the group's comment today on the situation:

Fascinating chat with Andrew Boff (pictured), the Tory Party's London Assembly Olympics spokesman, this afternoon.

As reported earlier here and on EGi News and in a great article on 24hourdash.com and an equally good piece by Dave Hill of The Guardian today, Boff has been providing a rare, critical voice recently about the Athletes Village.

He thinks the ODA is seriously missing a trick legacy-wise by building "soulless mixed-tenure courtyard developments" which fail to address London's biggest housing problem - too few houses for families with a garden and a door opening on to the street. He has no problem with the space in the apartments which he thinks is satisfactory but claims that social housing tenants and families are being "aggressively penalised".

The Evening Standard has today picked up on the trouble the Leabank Square Residents' Association has been getting itself in to with the "suits" [as they term them] at the ODA.
The Leabank Square blog, which features regularly on our blog here, has accused the ODA of lying about how much they have tried to reduce noise and air pollution at the development.
In response, Leabank's Sona Abantu-Choudhury says a letter has been sent by the ODA threatening court action if he did not remove the "libellous" comments. In particular the ODA claimed some of the comments were "personal and threatening" to an individual.

Talking of Tories and anodyne comments about progress (see here) on the buildings for the Olympics, Andrew Boff, the London Assembly Conservative Group's Olympic spokesman, has come out firing on all cylinders about the "tenanted ghetto" that he claims is the Athletes Village.
The full extent of Boff's litany against an Olympic village that is creating the "slums of the future" can be read in this little gem on social housing and public sector news wire 24hourdash.com
Boff accuses the ODA of having "learned nothing from the housing mistakes of the past" as he lays into the layout and design of the flats that are springing out of the ground at speed.

  Hugh Robertson, the Conservative Parties' Olympics spokesman, has used Reuters' web site to blog about progress so far on the delivery of the Olympics venues.

You can see what Roberston - who in the past has been unsurprisingly critical about overspend - has to say here. It's all fairly anodyne now and yet further evidence that the ODA and Lend Lease have pretty much put to bed concerns about budgets and the completion of venues these days.

Robertson does touch on what will be the next big story for us in the media to get stuck in to - the legacy.

So today we get a further clue as to who all those subcontractors and builders looking for some Olympic Gold from the Athletes Village need to start hounding.

As expected, the ODA and Lend Lease remain on time and on schedule in handing out Tier One building contracts for the homes. The two today confirmed the first Tier One residential plot contract has been awarded to Ardmore.

Shortlists for a further three Tier One contracts involving five residential plots have also been announced with the tender lists including: Galliford Try, Willmott Dixon/ Inspace, Brookfield Europe, Bennett Construction, North Midland Construction, Miller Construction, Mansell, Morgan Ashurst, Durkan Limited, Byrne Group, P. Elliott, Carillion Building, John Sisk & Son, Sir Robert McAlpine and Higgins Construction.

That, of course, leaves Lend Lease building out another five.

This posting is so tangentially linked to the London 2012 Olympics that I hesitate to press the publish button.

Nevertheless, as Boris has been as entertainingly off the wall as ever and it does vaguely have something to with his planning powers I'm pushing on.

According to today's Evening Standard London's mayor has fallen foul of Islington council's planning department by building a summer house on the balcony of his north London home.

Now, I may not be a planning expert but even I would have picked up the phone to Islington's planning team to ask if building a strange wooden structure on top of a Grade-II listed balcony was within planning regulations.

The Olympic Delivery Authority and Environment Agency this week jointly moved to play down concerns about the decision to bury low-level radioactive waste at the Olympics site in Stratford.
The response was prompted by a Sunday Express report that had unearthed documents revealing that thousands of tonnes of radioactive waste would be buried at a bunker next to the Stadium.
Understandably it hasn't gone down well with worried local residents see here and equally understandably local firebrand politician George Galloway  is getting hot under the collar about it.
In a statement repeated first by Construction News an ODA spokesman says the buried waste was "very low level radioactive material" and that the whole process has been carefully monitored.

Last week I revealed in Estates Gazette that one of the largest residential managers in the US is preparing to make its first major foray into the UK.

Seattle-based Pinnacle is in talks to partner insurance giant Aviva and agent CB Richard Ellis in their proposed £1bn private-rented residential fund.

The group is one of a number of North American firms that are targeting the UK on the back of the Homes and Communities Agency initiative to encourage institutional investment in private-rented flats and houses. I have it on good authority that one of the sites favoured for when the HCA initiative does get underway is the private element of the Olympic Village.

That of course makes great sense: the 1,439 private houses being delivered offer the scale that is required for institutions to be interested; the 1,000 three to four-bed family houses are just the type of buildings Pinnacle specialises in managing; and Nigel Hugill, a key figure in driving through the HCA initiative, has long seen the Village as the perfect vehicle for a pioneering private rented fund.

Interestingly, however, my sources inform me that Lend Lease, which was one of 64 groups to express interest in being involved in the first HCA-backed investor partnerships, has been told it will be not be HCA's soon to be announced shortlist. That of course does not rule out the Olympic site from being one of the first sites bought and managed by a private rented fund given that Lend Lease if working on a fee basis these days.

The ODA has just published one of its regular updates on progress on the Olympic Village with some useful pics here of the site as it is just now and some webcams too.

These updates are of course comforting, particularly as so much is happening. Rest assured we wouldn't be getting them if progress was slow.

Click here here for latest photos of construction work and here for design images.

And for the webcam experience click here.