00:00Hello, I'm Roger Madeline, I'm the Director of British Land, jointly in charge of the
00:14Canada Water Development and before that I was lucky enough to be the Chief Exec and
00:18the Development Director at Argent, responsible for Brindley Place, the conception of Paradise
00:25Circus now Forum up in Birmingham here.
00:28Birmingham's been a terrific city for several centuries and I'm lucky enough to have arrived
00:36here in the late 70s at university, watching it come out of some very, very tough times
00:44in the 70s and 80s and then seeing the plan, the Highbury Initiative and then a decade
00:51later that turned into the big city plan and that level of ambition with political leadership
00:57and executive leadership was terrific and I'm sure that's what it's got now.
01:05It needs to clearly set out its ambition in my view and in the view of many, Birmingham
01:10and other cities outside of London need to double if not treble or even quadruple in
01:15size to be competitive in the current climate and I'm sure that given the powers, given
01:24the autonomy, the ambition can certainly be here, give the cities the tools and let them
01:30get on and do it but Birmingham's got some great things going for it and with the leadership
01:37and with a clear vision it should be allowed to get on and try and hit that aspiration
01:43of doubling, trebling, trebling in size.
01:46Yeah, we're looking at international examples, connectivity between the various cities in
01:54various countries, we might choose to look at whether that's Germany or France or Italy
01:59or Spain is generally better.
02:02Now I know we do have a plan here, it's taken a little bit longer than we would have liked
02:07and High Speed 2 obviously is not quite what we all hoped for but connecting the cities
02:14to each other as well, it has been talked about for many decades.
02:21That's what we need to do to allow Birmingham and the other cities to expand.
02:27Now it is about the economy, it is obviously housing is phenomenally important and training
02:32and skills and all of that we know but fundamentally it's got to be driven by a successful economy
02:38and as I said earlier, if each city, if each local authority of each region could have
02:45a very, very strong economic growth department spokesman right up there at the chief executive
02:51or the leadership level to make sure that every decision that is made is about expanding
02:57the economy and capturing the benefits of growth and being very pragmatic about how
03:03to capture that growth after it has happened, not with the taxation that has been creeping
03:10in over the last couple of decades trying to fund affordable housing and infrastructure.
03:15There are some good examples up here with the tax incremental finance, the LEP that
03:21was led by Andy Street which delivered the infrastructure changes at Paradise Circus
03:26now Paradise Forum is a very good example and things like that should be looked at and
03:33expanded again to allow Birmingham to raise its full potential.
03:39Well I have been lucky enough to have spent several decades in development and had the
03:44privilege of working in Birmingham and Manchester and London and elsewhere, it's the same planning
03:50system but it's just been very interesting watching how different jurisdictions actually
03:57manage resource and deliver the planning system.
04:02First of all it needs a very, very clear vision and that can be city plans or local plans,
04:07very strong leadership and then good resources and priorities to get things done.
04:12I've given examples of the same planning system in various locations where it is interpreted
04:18in very different ways and resourced very differently.
04:21I said some of our projects in London where we have to do over 42 different massive documents,
04:29some costing hundreds of thousands of pounds, some taking years in the making and they literally
04:34go on the shelf and no one reads them or needs them in the future and I think someone
04:40reviewing and maybe that is the economic development officer, someone reviewing with real power
04:46saying you really do not need to do that retail impact assessment or that highways assessment
04:54for a development that is 10, 15 years in the making.
05:01The level and the complexity of what is being asked for, part of that is driven by legislation
05:06but quite a lot of it is being driven just by people on the ground asking for it because
05:11they can and that needs to be curtailed by someone who's got real power and real pragmatism
05:17and humility just to say is this really necessary, is it really going to add value to what we
05:23want to achieve.
05:30www.globalonenessproject.org
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