Greens take the lead
Tony Dyer, of the Green Party
We talk to Councillor Tony Dyer, the Green Party Leader of Bristol City Council, about his vision for the city, and what the recent change in administration might mean for the property sector.
The Council has shifted from a cabinet system back to a committee one.
How is that working out so far?
In general, I'd say it's actually worked a lot better than most people were expecting. One of the biggest concerns was that the speed of decision making might be slowed down. We've actually found that the opposite is true.
Under the mayor model, almost all of the key decisions needed to be made by cabinet, which only met once a month, and had to go through 25 or more agenda items in a two-hour meeting. That was hardly ideal.
Now we have eight committees – the one that I run meets monthly and the others every other month – and we each might have just eight or nine agenda items to discuss in that time. So the decision making is more thematic and there’s more time to discuss individual issues.
We also have a leader and chairs meeting which identifies cross cutting areas, and that can lead to doing things in a more productive way. For example, we have a housing proposal that will produce savings for the adult social care committee, which will then come to my committee for us to approve a large amount of capital spend. At the moment, the gap in Housing Benefit costs that we can reclaim from Government is something like £17,000,000 a year. We are aiming to no longer have that gap.
The Housing Benefits bill, in large part, is down to the severe housing shortage in Bristol and very high rents. How do you plan to square that particular circle?
So the local plan just ending, from 2006 to 2026, identified the number of homes to be delivered as 36,000. We're already at about 35,800 and we’ve still got two years to go – and we'll probably deliver another 3,000 to 4,000 in that time. However, that’s still well below the number of homes identified as needed.
Going forward, the local plan currently with the planning inspector has identified the capacity to deliver 2,000 homes per year – 1,000 homes per year less than what the government has identified as our target.
It's not going to be easy. It's not just about planning capacity, but also construction capacity, and that’s a wider problem than just Bristol. The Government says it wants to deliver 300,000 new homes a year, but people can't live in a planning application.
So there's a few things we're working on. One is trying to work with other partners to see what they can do to increase the delivery of homes. Two is working with organizations like Homes England to use their grant funding on top of what is also going to be available via S106 agreements.
We're one of those councils that still
has a housing revenue account (HRA).
At the moment, the HRA is in difficulties for various reasons, including the fact
that we had a regulatory judgment
against us – which we're trying to get
out from underneath. Once we've done that, the HRA can then make a more positive contribution to the delivery
of council housing.
We have Goram Homes as a partner, making use of the fact that Bristol City Council owns a lot of land. If we provide the land and the private sector partner provides the funding, then hopefully it's a win-win for everybody: we get a higher percentage of affordable housing and they're still able to deliver private market housing to make a return on.
Finally, we're looking at partnering with our registered provider partners, as well as having honest conversations with development partners. There are a few discussions going on behind the scenes around that, and we hope to be able to make announcements soon.
Developers are saying that building new homes in Bristol, particularly in the centre, is currently not viable
That’s something we're very aware of, and we're working with Savills on this. One approach is broadening the understanding of viability. Councillors, but also other participants, sometimes can have a very simplistic understanding of what viability actually means and what contributes to viability. So, one of the things we're looking at is what contributions or enabling factors we can introduce – as a planning authority, landowner and local authority – to improve our viability structure.
Part of that is having a more honest and open relationship, identifying those developers who we recognize are trying to do the best thing, not just not seeing them as the enemy. For example, some of the investment funds and developers who are prepared to look at the longer term in terms of how their investment
will pan out.
Where does the sustainability agenda fit into all of this?
You won't be surprised to know, as a Green-led council, that we also want to tackle climate change. At the same time, it's problematic because there's a cost.
We're looking at how can we turn that cost into something that's seen as more of an investment… solar panels and ground source heat pumps, for instance, are an opportunity to generate a revenue. Obviously, that doesn't work in all scenarios because, if you're building to sell, you lose that income; so that tends to be more attractive for registered providers or build-to-rent schemes.
Many of the new developments are going to students. Have we got the balance right in the city at the moment?
The business models for universities has changed drastically to the point where there's an incentive for them to increase the number of students, We want to move away from developments that are 100% PBSA and look wherever possible to get a mixture of tenures.
Have we got enough employment land going forward in the right places, and is what we do have under threat in some instances?
We don't have enough employment land; and, worse than that, we don't have enough of the right type of employment land.
We're seeing development with an emphasis on office-based jobs. My family members are plumbers or work on MOT testing sites, and people often forget quite how much of those industrial activities do take place in Bristol.
So I think there needs to be some
clear thinking. If you look at an average industrial park, only a third of it is actually occupied. Increasing that to a half would essentially increase the amount of industrial space available by pretty much 50%. And that's one of the areas we're looking at… reducing frontages, for instance. In Barking and Dagenham, they’ve started to have multi-storey developments. At the moment, I suspect that for most of Bristol, the numbers don't quite add up yet, but I think we're not far away from that.
How is the city doing now in processing planning applications?
Simone Wilding and her team have done a tremendous job, and we’re now actually processing applications quicker than they're coming in. But we're still not where we need to be. I suspect it'll probably be probably mid-next year before we finally get to the point where we feel that's a sustainable way to go forward.
Is the relationship with the BPAA working for you?
I’d say there’s still a way to go. Very high in our manifesto was wanting to make the council more collaborative – not just working cross party, but with other partners and bodies too. We’re now starting to look at what the “one city” process looks like for residents, and then what does that one city process look like for the commercial sector? For businesses? And included in that would be property agents, developers, and so on.
What would success look like for you at the end of this term in office?
This is probably going to sound very boring, but the first responsibility I have is to put the city on a sustainable financial footing. If we don't do that, we’re not going be able to do all the other things that we want to do.
The second thing is to provide the services that people need, and (for instance, with services like social care) increasingly turn them into preventative services. That means people's lives are better; and, if people have better lives, it's likely they're going be able to contribute more to the city as a whole.
Three, is to deliver not just housing… but communities. Because if you build communities right, you take the strain off the other services that people currently need.
