Rising East Online

Getting SUST in the Thames Gateway…
or how to save the planet and get paid for it

Patrick Wilson

2005 was the year the environment began to bite back. Melting ice caps, hurricanes in the gulf, oil production peaking, panic at the petrol pumps and the spectre of a new pandemic are all powerful portents that the four horsemen of the eco-apocalypse are, if not already saddled up, at least preparing to unbolt the stable doors.

Amid the Geldof-fuelled festival of this summer’s G8 summit, the quiet demise of the Kyoto agreement as a global framework for tackling climate change was unremarkable. It may have been the only game in town, but the big boys don’t want to play. So while contraction, convergence and carbon trading remain optional, and therefore probably inoperable, our leaders are now calling for the development of new environmental technologies that will reduce our CO2 emissions, and our dependence on declining oil and gas.

This is welcome, but in itself is unlikely to succeed unless supported by policy that is more seriously joined up than our government has so far proven itself capable of producing. There are many reasons why Whitehall’s stance on sustainability has been incoherent: policy is divided between several departments, generally at the lower end of the cabinet table; it not seen as a doorstep issue, and most damaging, environment benefit is still believed to imply economic cost.

There is some truth in the idea that it is bad for business to regulate, tax or discourage the production or consumption of energy, cars, cheap flights, subsidised food, or any of the other unsustainably produced goods we now enjoy. Multinationals can simply up sticks and shift production to parts of the world that that do not impose burdensome restrictions – as they and their influential lobbyists constantly seek to remind us. But corporations will always seek to increase profits and reduce and externalise costs, and it is up to governments to provide both the incentives and the regulatory framework to help them clean up their collective act.

Currently, the picture is patchy, with some successes, such as emissions controls on vehicles, landfill tax encouraging recycling and to some extent renewable energy. But rather than prompting a full-scale commitment to renewables, the prospect of declining oil supplies has fuelled a revival among the promoters of nuclear power, an industry that has already cost taxpayers billions and will continue to do so for decades after the last plant closes. Meanwhile, environmental regulations that do exist, such as energy efficiency standards for new houses, are rarely enforced.

The finance model for public buildings also tends to militate against sustainability. Here the artificial economics of capital versus revenue budgeting tend to ensure that eco-friendly design features, for example light wells, heat pumps, and grey water recycling are ‘value-engineered out’ before first footings are laid. Thus under current models, even environmental technologies that enhance efficiency and reduce running costs with economic returns after as few as five years rarely get a look in, and because new build is VAT exempt, it is nearly always cheaper to knock old buildings down and build anew rather than restore existing stock.

But in some areas, enterprise is already ahead. Both Jonathan Porritt, the sustainable development adviser to Number 10 and George Monbiot, the influential independent commentator and erstwhile Visiting Fellow at the University of East London (UEL), believe that business is ready to develop a range of environmentally sustainable technologies. Domestic energy generation is a case in point, where costs of new generations of micro-renewables and other technologies are coming down rapidly and new producers are entering the market.

This analysis offers grounds for hope, because it means the floodgates of eco-friendly innovation can be opened by making changes to the planning, regulatory and public finance framework, a technical adjustment of incentives, checks and balances. And indeed this has recently been shown to work both in the UK and abroad.

Return to top

Meanwhile, in the Thames Gateway…

The ODPM’s optimistically titled Sustainable Communities Plan calls for around a quarter of a million new homes and some 100,000 new jobs to be created within a giant wedge of floodplain stretching from Tower Bridge to Southend and the Medway ports.

The advent of 2012 adds a new twist to the tale, by shifting the centre of developmental gravity both westward into the Lee/Lea Valley, and onto the territory of politics. To deliver 2012 and its legacy will require a great deal of investment, and with the eyes of the world upon it, the Olympic Delivery Authority will be under pressure to live up to its name – the key question being how much and what sort of legacy will be delivered.

Within Thames Gateway, the chunks of land earmarked for development – generally on post-industrial brownfield sites – are characterised by ‘multiple environmental challenge’. The plan is to build thousands of low cost houses on contaminated land surrounded by industrial estates, electricity pylons and sewage works, downriver of the Thames Barrier and cut off from the existing town centres.

This is an unpromising flagship for sustainable development, and has led to the unkind characterisation of Thames Gateway as ‘the Cockney Siberia’. But the history of London’s growth since medieval times, right up to our current phase of post-industrial regeneration, is driven by enterprising developers successfully speculating on such unlikely plots of real estate.

For example, one of the foundation stones of the City of London’s wealth was its programme of bridge building. This was financed by the pre-purchase of the Lambeth and Southwark waterfront complete with pubs, brothels and theatres, which multiplied in value as a result of the bridges’ construction and maintenance in perpetuity, on the back of the development pressure and value uplift generated by the new bridges.

Developers make their profits by speculative purchase of land on which they hope to gain planning permission for development, at which point they can either develop it themselves or sell it to another developer. Above all, they are speculating that the land will increase in value as a result of public sector investment in infrastructure, such as transport links, leading to increasing desirability of the area, planning support for development and further uplift in value. Because demand for housing is high and the planning framework friendly, healthy profits are made.

In the greater Thames Gateway, this is now beginning to happen. For all the best laid schemes of the ODPM, ODA, LDA, GLA, LSPs, and the rest of the alphabet soup of government agencies, the balance of power is shifting from the politicians to the house-builders. The challenge for proponents of sustainable development is to find ways of working with developers that will not only improve the quality of life of communities and enhance the environment, but will do so at a profit to the developers.

There are three, surefire ways to win the developers’ hearts, minds and consultancy contracts. First, we can design interventions that reduce the actual cost of construction, for example through innovation in design or building technology. Most eco-friendly innovation is currently not as cheap as the brick boxes currently in vogue, but this can soon change.

Secondly, we can help them realise increased profits, by helping increase the sale price. Again, this could be a design issue, such as imaginative use of waterfront, or by enhanced biodiversity, or innovative water recycling or renewable energy scheme. However the added investment must result in a benefit that is readily marketable in the brochure.

The market for ‘eco-enhanced’ new build housing is only now being tested. While there is a huge demand for sustainability as a lifestyle concept, that value is perceived to dwell in the converted watermill rather than a new Crest Nicholson executive unit. Greenwich Peninsula is perhaps an example of successful eco-friendly development, and BedZed, the pioneering zero-emissions social housing development in Croydon, was oversubscribed well before construction began. This demonstrates a significant level of potential demand that is now beginning to interest developers.

Finally, and perhaps most profitably, we can help developers reduce their marginal costs. The cost of construction is minimal compared to the marginal cost of borrowing and the opportunity cost of investment, and the builders’ biggest bugbears are time, risk and uncertainty. Having bought the land and applied for planning permission, the clock is ticking and anyone who has objected to a planning proposal knows that developers will go to great lengths to win you over.

Encouragingly, the Mayor of London is increasingly using his planning powers to block environmentally suspect schemes such as Thames Water’s proposed £200 million desalination plant in Beckton, and to enforce sustainability targets on new developments. This summer he also appointed Allan Jones, the man who converted Woking into a photo-voltaic pioneer, as London’s climate change tsar, signalling a clear commitment to reducing the capital’s ecological footprint.

As sustainability consultants, we need to provide site-specific solutions that deliver sustainable social benefits to smooth the path to permissions from enlightened planning authorities. Building in social and environmental benefit to developers’ applications should result in surer, swifter progress through the planning system for genuinely sustainable projects.

Return to top

How to get SUST

Having identified a market, what services do we actually have to offer, and how do we go about developing them? We can divide our offer roughly into ‘hard’ design, engineering and environmental science solutions, and ‘soft’ economic and social science based consultancy.

London East Research Institute is building a solid reputation for the latter, with regeneration impact studies under way for a range of local government and commercial clients. This is valuable research, helping us learn the lessons of the recent past, and there is much scope for developing more forward-looking analysis. For example what price to developers a piece of high-quality research that demonstrates the premium target demographics will pay for sustainable living in the Thames Gateway? While there is no magic formula, we are developing a generic framework for site and project specific analysis.

On the ‘hard’ front, there is progress in several areas including water, waste, energy and biodiversity. UEL is the business sector leader in Environmental Technologies for Knowledge East, the partnership of HEIs being launched to deliver Knowledge Exchange services with support from the Higher Education Innovation Fund.

One example of what a working environmental technology might look like is the Manufactured Aggregates Research Centre. Set up at UEL in 2003, MARC is a pilot plant that uses a patent kilning process to turn waste materials including pulverised fuel ash and sewage sludge into high performance lightweight aggregates for building. This effectively harvests London’s rich natural - and unnatural – resources, may soon becomes an economic as well as eco-efficient alternative to hauling aggregate quarried from the Forest of Dean.

With increasingly well-funded and organised knowledge transfer infrastructure in Knowledge Dock, and a growing reputation for effective interdisciplinary research and consultancy, UEL is well positioned to both deliver projects, and build partnerships. Researchers from Imperial and Leeds and companies from across Europe are working with MARC. UEL architects and civil engineers also have teaching links with the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales. Researchers at UEL’s School of Health and Bioscience are working on a number of projects with landfill operators and the Environment Agency on flood defence and bio-remediation of contaminated ground.

Other key areas for development include renewable energy, particularly biogas, biodiversity enhancement, geotextiles and new plastics, pipeline technology, GIS modelling, life cycle analysis and business process simulation. With finding from the DTI, UEL is involved in an increasing number of Knowledge Transfer Partnerships with a range of companies.

What all this activity amounts to is still taking shape, but it could mean something like a Centre for Sustainability Technologies (with the nickname of SUST), as envisaged by UEL Development Manager John Lock. This could operate as an R&D centre working with business and the public sector to generate new commercial activity on sustainability principles, that limits the ecological footprint of business impacts and increases biodiversity outcomes.

SUST might have a number of working themes, such as the waste chain - helping London achieve a transformation in its management of waste; urban regeneration - advising on sustainable housing development; applying modelling and design expertise, such as using GIS to map utility pipelines; mapping and modelling to minimise polluting side-effects of industrial processes, and reviews that reflect how policy actually operates and where it can be improved.

Working with partners of all kinds, new themes can be developed over time, and it is hoped SUST can deliver measurable outcomes in business innovation and expansion, helping to secure inward investment and new commercial opportunities, support for brownfield site remediation and development, and translation of sustainability principles into market activity.

And having created working examples of sustainability technologies in the Thames Gateway, we will be in a position to influence public policy on sustainability, for example incentives and regulation that create the conditions for further improvements in business practice.

This might not by itself lead from eco-armageddon to a promised land of true sustainability, but it will be a good start. The economic and policy drivers aren’t going away. Right now we have the academic research expertise, the knowledge transfer expertise and organisation, the partnerships with key agencies and the will to make it happen. If you think you can help save the planet and get paid for it, why not join us?

Patrick Wilson is Public Relations Manager at the University of East London, an enthusiastic environmentalist, and an adviser to London East Research Institute.

Return to top

---

© 2004·06