Lord Mawson
Main Page: Lord Mawson (Crossbench - Life peer)Olympics 2012: Regeneration Legacy
Lord Mawson Excerpts
Lord Mawson
That this House takes note of progress made in the regeneration of East London since the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and the remaining challenges.
Lord Mawson (CB)
My Lords, a great deal has happened in east London since the summer of 2012, when the world marvelled not only at this country’s ability to put on such a successful Olympic and Paralympic Games and to arrange the weather for it, but also its bold promises to create a legacy from the Games in east London second to none. While there have been some challenges, the legacy promises made in east London in terms of regeneration are on track and developing at quite a pace. I declare an interest as a director of the London Legacy Development Corporation and as chairman of the Communities and Regeneration Committee.
I first became involved in the Olympics 17 years ago, when it was becoming clear to east Londoners that if London put its hat into the ring, the only place in the capital city with enough vacant land to hold the Games was on our doorstep in the Lower Lea Valley. It was also clear that if the Games came in 2012, they would present east London with a bold opportunity for regeneration at a scale that had not been seen since the Victorian age. The Games could act as a catalyst and speed up the regeneration process that was already well under way down the valley. It could help join the dots and connect the development nodes to the south at the Greenwich peninsula and the Royal Docks with the £3.7 billion regeneration programme already proposed to the north, in Canning Town.
Across the water from there was Canary Wharf, the business district, today due to double in size in the next 10 years, and to the north was the £1.7 billion community regeneration programme in Poplar, also already under way and championed by the local housing company, Poplar HARCA, and the Bromley by Bow Centre and its partners. This community regeneration programme had a focus on community building, enterprise and entrepreneurship in what were formerly dependent housing estates. Connect these developments with Stratford and a new Westfield shopping centre—at that time a twinkle in the eye—and position the Olympic site next door as a catalyst, and one could begin to imagine a new city emerging in the east of London, with its own airport and world-class rail communications network. Sir David Varney, former CEO of Shell and BG and chairman of O2, described it as one of the most significant investment zones in the western world.
What connected these development nodes together was the 6.5 miles of waterways which have driven the social and economic life of east London for 2,000 years. Fly into City Airport and look down and one can see it. What was coming to life was what the late Reg Ward originally described, in his first plans for the London Docklands Development Corporation, as a water city—I have copies of his original documents. This was a dream. Today this vision is becoming a reality and we need central government to understand and ever more focus on the economic benefits east London is once again bringing not only to London but to our national economy. There is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the business, public and social enterprise sectors to grasp the moment and join the dots. There may also be important hard-won lessons here to share with the northern powerhouse and other city regions that dream of similar transformation.
I go back to the detail of what we have achieved on the Olympic Park since 2012, as its tentacles spread down the waterways and out into the surrounding communities of the Lower Lea Valley. It is a little over 10 years since London won the bid in Singapore to stage the Games of the 30th Olympiad. Since the end of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, this country has secured the most advanced legacy of any modern Olympic and Paralympic Games. The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is now open and flourishing, with 8 million visitors since it opened in July 2013. The permanent venues are thriving, with spectacular events such as the Rugby World Cup 2015 and many regular users. Some 40,000 additional jobs will be located on and around the park by 2025.
East London has a history of building public sector housing estates which have been both a social and economic disaster, which we do not intend to repeat. We want to build not just housing but integrated communities that connect people and place and encourage business and enterprise and a sense of well-being and community. The first of five new neighbourhoods is now under construction, with two other neighbourhoods brought forward by six years. Some 31% of the homes we build will be affordable and 24,000 new homes will be built in the wider area by 2031. Many of the essential elements critical to delivering probably the most successful Games to date have helped with the unfolding regeneration story.
Before the Games, we created an effective process to deliver the venues, stage the events and hand the venues over for legacy use. The key ingredients were ensuring that we had dedicated bodies for delivering venues and infrastructure and for staging the events with high-quality, motivated personnel. It was also essential to have cross-party political support at national, regional and local government levels. That support did not waiver when Boris Johnson was elected as Mayor of London in May 2008 and the national Government changed in 2010. Post-Games transformation work began as soon as the Paralympic Games ended.
That work and the development of the park is the responsibility of the London Legacy Development Corporation, a regeneration body answerable to the Mayor of London. It has plan-making and development control powers and is a single point of contact for developers, investors and landowners. From autumn 2012 to spring 2014, the LLDC undertook a major programme of work to create the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which opened in phases from July 2013 to April 2014. One key to ensuring success was to ensure that the permanent venues had their long-term legacy secured as soon as possible. The Copper Box Olympic handball arena is now a public sports centre for the local community and has hosted major events, attracting 800,000 visits since its opening in July 2013. The London Aquatics Centre and its two 50-metre swimming pools are hugely popular, with 1.2 million visitors already. There is a big demand from schools and swimming clubs and a waiting list for the Tom Daley Diving Academy.
The ArcelorMittal Orbit opened in April 2014 and there are plans for a new slide to attract even more visitors. It will be one of the highest slides in the world and Boris promises us that he will be the first to give it a try—watch this space. The Lee Valley VeloPark, which opened in March 2014, now has four cycling disciplines and is a venue for major competitions. Sir Bradley Wiggins broke the one-hour distance record there in June 2015. The Lee Valley Hockey and Tennis Centre opened in 2014 and is the host this year to the EuroHockey Championships and wheelchair tennis championships.
The stadium has of course been the greatest challenge. Its transformation was paused twice, in 2013 and 2015, to allow athletics events to take place and for five matches in the Rugby World Cup this autumn. Almost 500,000 spectators will have passed through the venue this year. The stadium will now be a national competition centre for British athletics and home for West Ham United Football Club. It is an iconic venue that will keep east London on the world map. It will be capable, going forward, of hosting a wide variety of other sporting and cultural events, from those five matches in the Rugby World Cup and the Sainsbury’s Anniversary Games to a motorsports race of champions event—as well as hosting the 2017 IPC and IAAF world athletics championships.
People have asked why we could not leave the stadium as it was. The reality was that much of the infrastructure for the stadium was temporary, so a new roof covering all the seats was required so that it could stage international sporting events of the highest standard. It will be the UK’s only IAAF cat 1 and UEFA cat 4 accredited venue. It was a massive engineering project, requiring a new permanent roof and significant work to strengthen infrastructure to support the load. A new retractable seating system has been installed to make the venue as flexible as possible.
One of the exciting developments, for me, is Here East—the development of the former press and broadcast centres. This building is bigger than Canary Wharf, laid horizontally, and the LLDC has just signed a 200-year lease with a technology company to create a new business district generating 5,300 jobs. The building is already 40% let, with tenants including BT Sport, Loughborough University, the new London postgraduate campus, Hackney Community College, an Infinity data centre and Wayne McGregor Random Dance—a world-class dance company.
The regeneration of the Olympic Park has not just been about buildings. It has also been about pulling down the 11 miles of fences that surrounded the park during Games time and connecting this 248-hectare site with local people and the local communities that surround it down the Lower Lea Valley. Forty-five thousand people have now participated in events as part of the “Active People, Active Park” programme. A community-based Paralympic sports programme, Motivate East, and the staging of the annual National Paralympic Day has been helped by £1.1 million in funding. Seventeen thousand sport and physical activity opportunities have been delivered for disabled people.
The major construction works at the park have allowed the LLDC to help create job and apprenticeship opportunities for local people, particularly for young people and underrepresented groups. The Games were not the end of the building period; in some ways, they were just a kick-start to a major regeneration programme. Hundreds of local people have been trained in industry-required trades and skills at the park.
Some of us in east London learnt many years ago that we are the environments that we live, work and play in. Quality design matters. The park is becoming a benchmark for design standards on accessibility and inclusive design. Some of the new buildings we are creating will be world-class. We are very conscious as a board of directors at the legacy corporation that we are not just rebuilding a park but are responsible for a critical catalyst, which will in time influence the transformation of an area down the Lower Lea Valley that is the size of some cities. Many newer developments down the valley have much to learn from all this work— and we want to share the lessons learnt. It is our hope that the Royal Docks, which is the next big piece of the regeneration jigsaw, will take on board these lessons and not repeat past mistakes.
The transformation of the 248 hectares of the Olympic Park is not confined to the park. One of the central goals of the regeneration programme has been to see the impact of the Games spill across the park boundary and out into its surrounding communities. Westfield Stratford City is today the largest urban shopping mall in northern Europe and attracts more than 40 million visitors each year to its 1.9 million square feet of retail space and three hotels. Future plans include 1.1 million square feet of office space. The international quarter borders the park with 4 million square feet of work space, 330 new homes, a new hotel and more than 50,000 square feet of shops and restaurants. It will create space for 25,000 jobs with Transport for London, while the Financial Conduct Authority have already committed to moving there by 2018. Glasshouse Gardens is under construction, with luxury apartments due to be occupied from 2016 with completion in 2017. Chobham Farm is creating 1,200 new homes in a mixed development to the east of the park. Lea Valley River Park has connected the park to the Royal Docks and Thames to the south, with a new continuous walking and cycling route along the River Lea. A new entrance is planned for Stratford station.
The legacy plans for the Olympic Park are not set in stone. They are constantly reviewed to ensure that they are fit for purpose and deliver the best outcomes for local communities. One of the planned neighbourhoods on the park was Marshgate Wharf, which has been through such a review. As a result of this process, it will now become the home to a new cultural and education district that Boris calls Olympicopolis—not easily said if you have false teeth. This exciting £2 billion project, bigger than the Centre Pompidou in Paris, will be home to new branches of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Sadler’s Wells dance company and, we hope, the Smithsonian Institution. In addition, University College London will create a new campus and University of the Arts London will combine its separate buildings to create one new home for the London College of Fashion.
The Government have committed £141 million to this scheme, master planners have been appointed for the UCL East campus and an architectural team led by Allies and Morrison is working on designs and a masterplan for Stratford waterfront. We hope that this scheme alone will create £2.8 billion of economic benefit and 3,000 new jobs. It will drive more than 1.5 million additional visitors to the park each year and deliver some 780 homes. The scheme neatly encapsulates the Olympic legacy. It is highly ambitious in its scope and objectives, will secure a lasting impact on local communities and will cement the creation of a new part of the capital in the area around Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park as it continues to be transformed.
This debate is timely, as the Foundation for FutureLondon will be launched later this evening at an event on the park, with the core task of securing those major philanthropic donations to complement the funds already committed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Mayor of London and the partner organisations involved.
I was very encouraged this summer to take 300 East End children into the Here East complex on the park for the first time, as part of a science summer school programme that Professor Brian Cox and I have been running in a local school in Tower Hamlets over the last four years. The summer school has been focused on connecting the school science curriculum with world-class university academics and local technology and engineering businesses that are putting down roots in the Lower Lea Valley. It has been focused on finding some of those 1 million engineers who we are short of in this country, and on which the success of our future economy so depends. Listening to 16 year-olds at Here East describe in detail the complex molecular biology of diabetes, seeing them engage with world-class scientists and engineers and listening to a 16 year-old West Indian boy describe in detail the Higgs boson was mind blowing. It gave us all just a little clue as to the role of the Olympicopolis and the Olympic Park, going forward. It pointed us to a talent pool that is critical to the future economy of this country, which will be triggered only if we can all move beyond our old-fashioned government silos and join the dots.
I finish on a personal note. Delivering the Olympic legacy in east London has been a long journey. It has required key leaders in the public, business and community sectors to come together and trust each other—to take the long view and to care about a place over a long period of time. It has required a clear and determined commitment to engage with and embrace the talent of a global community that is the modern east London—a community defined today not by stereotypes from the last war but by innovation, creativity, enterprise and entrepreneurship.
At a time when the Mayor of London is launching the “City in the East” master plan, I hope that the lessons that have been learnt delivering the legacy programme to date will be applied to these wider opportunities. It will be important that they are not run from City Hall or Whitehall. In the same way that the legacy company has brought together four boroughs to work closely with local partners, developers and communities, it will be important that the development nodes are locally owned and managed.
Investment will be needed. I encourage the Minister to reflect with the mayor on the less-than-glorious previous attempts to develop the Thames Gateway via central control with many boards and a wide range of representative bodies and contrast that with the focused approach of the legacy company. There is enormous potential, but this will not be delivered unless there are sufficient resources for infrastructure, particularly transport, including use of the bridges over the Thames. Equally, it will live up to its promise only if key local partners are empowered to take control and make it happen.
I finish with two brief questions for the Minister. First, given the scale of the developments in the Lower Lea Valley and that the centre of gravity of London is moving inextricably east, what practical steps are the Government taking to ensure that Eurostar stops at Stratford International station? The platform is already built. Secondly, what practical steps is the Minister able to take to ensure that the lessons learnt from the successful delivery of the regeneration legacy are applied to wider developments in east London and form an integral part of the wider devolution narrative for other parts of the UK, including the northern powerhouse, to ensure that they achieve their full potential? I beg to move.
Lord Mawson
My Lords, I thank all those who have taken part in this debate, particularly those in the Chamber who have made such a major contribution through the Games to the regeneration of east London. We are very thankful for that and I give many thanks for the kind remarks from colleagues. We all know that it has been quite a journey.
I will make one or two comments. On the employment gap, there is a limit to what one can say in a speech, but perhaps I might draw people’s attention to a speech that I made in this Chamber a couple of weeks ago on apprenticeships and some of the work we have been doing on that. There is a lot more to do. Across the road the Bromley by Bow Centre, which I founded, has 60 local businesses operating around the park. The science summer school is all about this agenda. I would draw attention to the work of Sir Robin Wales, the Labour Mayor of Newham, who has been absolutely consistent about this point and made a major contribution.
I welcome very much colleagues’ support for Stratford International station, as I do the Minister’s comments. I encourage her to speak to the noble Lords, Lord Heseltine and Lord Deben, who were personally responsible for ensuring that that platform appeared in Stratford.
I have given some of the numbers on local community involvement in the park. I was actually at a party at Here East last night, which is just opening its first piece of that building with a fantastic local event and a reception. There is a very big event tonight in the stadium with the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, and others, which is focused on the Olympicopolis. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, that we may need 10 years to make a proper judgment about these big things. They take time.
We understand well the needs of long-term residents in the area. We focus closely on them and it is very good that the staff at the legacy company are people from the area, who have worked practically on these issues to deliver real things over a very long period. I will ask the chief executive of Poplar HARCA—which, just so we understand the history here, is a local resident-controlled housing company—to write to the noble Lord setting out why it is today committed to creating mixed communities and what the practical realities are in doing this in Poplar today. I would be very happy to share with the Minister my experience of this company, which I have been involved with for over 20 years.
Successive Governments have played their part in giving the people of east London the necessary cross-party support that created the essential conditions and continuity necessary to trigger changes on this scale. The job is not finished, and there is more to do, but the die is set and we welcome anyone who wants to invest or bring their institutions east. It is where the future economy of London lies.
I hope that this Government will share the lessons learnt with other regions of the country as they rightly invest large amounts of taxpayers’ money in the north of England. Britain’s economy today is on the move and we in east London want once again to play our role as a central driver in the capital city, focused on innovation, enterprise and entrepreneurship—attributes that set this nation apart from the rest of the world. We are absolutely committed to local people being part of all of that. We have in east London the largest artistic community outside New York. We have global brands moving in. What we need now is clarity and focus within central government to see the bigger picture in the Lower Lea Valley, join the dots and make the connection in the narrative that tells about the Olympic Park and the surrounding area. Today, east London is on the move and we are ready and up for the task.