Politicians must acknowledge that public/private partnerships are not bad for society, the chief executive of Cain International, Jonathan Goldstein, has reiterated in the wake of the local elections.
The hard-left Momentum faction are expected to be at the forefront of Labour holds in Newham and Haringey, where the council’s £2bn HDV joint venture with Lendlease to build 6,000 homes is expected to be disbanded under its new leadership.
“It is possible to approach development with a level of reasonableness in terms of commerciality and serving a social purpose,” he said.
“It is possible to combine both these and the view that these are mutually exclusive is a dangerous one in modern politics.
“This notion [that] public/private partnerships are inherently bad for society is misguided, and there is a type of capitalism that can exist with a sense of social purpose and it is wrong to castigate all people who are in the commercial world as if they are against the interest of the ordinary man.
“It is a short sighted, outdated and naïve notion.”
Relief for landowners
Goldstein was a Labour member until Jeremy Corbyn became leader.
He has been at the forefront of campaigning for Corbyn to take a harder stance on anti-Semitism within the party, in his role of chairman of the Jewish Leadership Council, and believes that the UK may be past “peak Corbyn”.
He suggested that the failure of Labour to win key London boroughs that they had targeted – such as Westminster, Wandsworth, Kensington and Chelsea, and Barnet – will be a relief to some landowners who feared they would be met with an anti-development stance.
“There will be people with holdings in those areas feeling a lot more comfortable this morning, having seen the Haringey experience and the massive undermining of that partnership,” he said.
Planning overhaul
Following the election, Goldstein called for mayor of London Sadiq Khan to reconsider his approach to accelerating the delivery of housing in the capital.
“The whole planning process has needed an overhaul for some time and the housing agenda has to be more aggressively pursued. It takes too long and is too costly to get through the boroughs.
“The numbers of houses built since Sadiq became mayor, there has been no noticeable difference to the previous administration. It is top of the agenda for the mayor but there seems to be no analysis as to why it’s not happening.
“The result at least means those developers can largely continue to plan on the same basis that they had done.”
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