Shravan Joshi has a message for the world at this year’s MIPIM conference. “The clear message we need to get across to everyone – the entire supply chain, investors, developers, anchor tenants – is that the City of London is investible,” says the chairman of the City of London Corporation’s planning and transportation committee. “It’s investment-grade-ready for money to flow in, for construction to occur.”
But don’t think that means Joshi is only looking inwards at the Square Mile. There’s more to play for than that, he says. As a founding member of Opportunity London, a public-private partnership set up to to attract money into London, the City Corporation now has to think bigger and reach across borough boundaries. “You are getting a coalition of the willing to write the London story,” he tells EG in an interview ahead of MIPIM.
Earlier this month, Opportunity London published its first investment prospectus, pitching nine big development projects in the city that need £9.6bn of investment. They include Barking Riverside, Crystal Palace Park Residential, Brent Cross Town and Millennium Mills in Silvertown.
None of the nine are in the City. That might change in a future prospectus, Joshi says – he would be keen to see Smithfield Market and Blackfriars’ Puddle Dock feature – but the first batch needed a sprawling scale that the City, by nature of its size, does not offer. Besides, Joshi adds: “In the City, we don’t do masterplanning. We have avoided masterplanning because in a way the Square Mile itself is a masterplan.”
Joshi is nonetheless committed to promoting all nine projects. “The issue we have had is that there has not been a promotion of London investment from a built environment perspective in a co-ordinated way before,” he says. “All of the members of Opportunity London are promoting those schemes without borough boundaries.”
In a sense, he adds, that is what investors would expect. “If you are an international investor, do you care if it’s in Southwark, Lewisham, Bromley or Merton?” he asks. “What you’re investing in, what you’re buying into, is London. We have got to de-risk the London story.”
What does that de-risking look like in practice? “About 90% of investment into real estate in the Square Mile comes from international money,” Joshi says. “Investment committees sitting in the States or Canada or Singapore or Tokyo or Hong Kong need to understand what they are buying into, not just at a micro level on a specific site, but they will have to consider country political risk in that too.
“For me, what the Opportunity London story needs to do is cover every aspect of that national story, and then bring it down to a London piece and say, ‘If you want to do UK investment, this is where you start. Hopefully it’s not where you finish – hopefully you spread your wings from London – but the landing zone needs to be within the M25.”
Joshi has been in the game long enough to know that there will be tough questions to answer as investors do their due diligence, even for a local authority as welcoming of development as the City Corporation.
“Planning, procurement and policy: Those three things are seen as the biggest risks from an investment perspective,” he says. “If you can overcome those hurdles and show transparency and clarity to people on those three, you overcome a whole bunch of obstacles.”
Problems with planning are a bugbear for almost any investor and developer. But Joshi says his team of officers has created an approach to engagement during the pre-application process that means by the time a scheme is in front of him and the committee, “there is a high degree of certainty around the planning policies that are complied with and a high degree of certainty around the evidence base for that application”.
“Most schemes that come to us in planning are 100% speculative,” he adds. “Someone has gone out there and bought the land and come up with a scheme, mobilised a team, paid good money for that, and then they come to us and go, ‘We would like to talk to you about building this tower’ or hopefully these days retrofitting a scheme. For us, that pre-application process works really well. We have said very clearly we are going to address whole life carbon at the very outset. So if you haven’t got your sustainability story sorted out on day one, it’s going to be a very difficult course to navigate from there forward.
“Having those conversations upfront means that you run less of a risk later on of going off the rails.”
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