Age doesn’t always mean experience, as this week’s guest on PropCast demonstrates to the fullest. Tom Sleigh, Chairman of the Planning and Transportation Committee for the City of London Corporation, is the youngest planning chair the City has ever had, and potentially the country. Working in one of the most important square miles to the UK economy, infrastructure must be at the heart of all decisions made.

The City has undergone a revival in recent years, driven largely by the macro and micro trends since the end of COVID. As Chair of the Planning and Transport Committee, Sleigh acknowledges he has got a lot of plates spinning to keep things running smoothly. On transportation, Sleigh believes the Corporation has a responsibility to provide high quality streets that ensure the smooth flow of people, whether that be on foot, bicycle or other forms of transport. It is the planning side that Sleigh says gets him asked far more questions, but this is the element he views as fairly straightforward. He was to continue to offer a predictable, stable, plan-led planning system that investors, developers and everyone else in the chain wanted to come into business with. Sleigh acknowledges that this is different from the perception sometimes given off, with many people seeing it as adversarial and that often people believe Planning Committees view all change as bad.

Sleigh went further to explain how various organisations get a far heavier weighting than others when it comes to planning. These come in many forms, such as statutory bodies, heritage bodies and environmental bodies, although the latter less so in London. This is before you get to the many letters of objection from those ‘who are fully signed up to what seems to be a national pastime of objecting to planning applications.’ The City, Sleigh argues, is different and an outlier. He feels things would be better if people were more like this, with last year acting as their best year for applications in the front door in the last decade – and that’s when they started counting! Last year Sleigh’s Committee approved half a million square metres of new grade A office space, with a 96% approval rate overall. Sleigh says this is how planning should be: not adversarial. But, he notes, it has become more so, and is probably at its worst in the last five to ten years.

The secret to this proactive engagement is a very clear policy document, titled City Plan 2040. It is a few months away from adoption and enforcement, but it already carries a huge amount of weight in Committee decisions. It is extensive, covering how high you can build in the east of the City, through to material reuse and elements on quality design. If compliance is achieved here then the application will move onto stage two, where applicants will engage with case officers and the wider team, whether that be a heritage expert or someone with an engineering background to ensure it can become committee ready. Fundamentally, it is ensuring an application is policy compliant and then ensuring that planning officers have helped work it up to a high standard. Sleigh is proud to say that a lot of people they engage with say the City’s planning officers set a very high bar.

When asked about the lack of resources that planning departments face nationally, something that has steadily increased over the last twenty years, Sleigh acknowledges the problem. Planning teams have seen budgets cuts and headcount reductions, like many government organisations, and Sleigh feels that is reflected in the outcomes. The City is different, with a fantastically qualified and larger team, which matters a lot. The projects they work on can be the difference between a major bank coming to the City or not, with a big push to get HQs back into the City post-pandemic. This all matters, inspiring confidence and stability which will drive more international businesses to join them.

In an area steeped in as much history as the City, construction can often unearth the unexpected, such as recently at 85 Grace Church Street which uncovered an element of a Roman Forst in the basement when excavating, which was part of the largest building north of the Alps at the time of construction! This does slow down the planning process, with a change of application back at committee adding costs and time, but the result is a free to enter museum in the basement which encourages a more lively streetscape and helps differentiate it from competing cities such as Singapore and New York.

The City isn’t just about offices. Sleigh talks passionately about the work his team has done to make it more appealing to people outside of finance, known as Destination City which is an acknowledgement of the desire for a lively, more public City. He references the original designs for the Barbican Centre, which was supposed to be lively for people to enjoy both at ground level and on the pedestrian walkways. The City can often be viewed as just a nine to five, Monday to Friday place and Sleigh is determined that is not the case. He acknowledges this has challenges, just as Soho did when they rolled out al fresco dining during and after COVID. The City suits many different needs and isn’t trying to be ‘gritty and fun’ like Shoreditch or Brick Lane, but also doesn’t face the planning issues that they do. This is largely down to the City’s very small population which is almost entirely focussed in the Barbican. This doesn’t mean they are without their issues. As they are often not the landowner there are few levers of encouragement or coercion that can be used, therefore their use must be strategic. One of these is the City’s cultural use policy, where a building over 10,000 square metres must have some form of cultural use, which developers largely seem to support, states Sleigh. Hotels are another area for expansion in the City, with all the data showing London as a whole has a shortage of hotel beds. This can have an interesting impact in the office space where grade B can be quite difficult to convert to grade A, but is very easy to convert into hotels.

Turning to politics, Sleigh is asked about the current government’s various pledges on planning. Sleigh explains his disbelief at the sheer bureaucracy and levels of paperwork that even modest applications require, expanding to the volume of huge applications appearing at committee which, Sleigh assures, he reads every page of. Does AI have a role to play here? Sleigh is unsure but is under no doubt committees will probably decrease in size as the technology catches up, alongside changes in delegation within planning. But Sleigh thinks, on a personal level, that planning isn’t going far enough. He shares a few ideas, including the reduction of the threshold of decision making as local plans have increased significantly in length and are often out of date before they’re finished! Sleigh feels the City does a good job, with the most evidence based, forward looking and pragmatic local plan.