Insider Event: North West Property Leaders - Shaping Partnerships
Chantelle Dietz caught up with speakers Deborah McLaughlin, Stephen Kinsella and Stephen Wild to find out their key takeaways and insights from Insider's Property Leaders event on public-private partnerships, which took place on 17 Sep in Manchester.
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00:00So Deborah what are your key takeaways from the event today? I thought it's a
00:13great event today to see both public sector and private sector people sharing
00:17their views of partnerships and my takeaways are that everybody had a
00:21common agreement that mutual respect is really really important so
00:25understanding your partner, what drives them, what motivates them. I think the
00:29second thing is about shared mission so where we can clear about what the
00:33mission is and the outcomes you want to achieve and aligned to that is people
00:37talked about not getting too much into the detail about how things get
00:41delivered. So what are the priorities for public sector partners at the
00:44moment? At the moment they're probably feeling under pressure because of
00:48budgets, they've had numbers of years of austerity and they're thinking of
00:52budgets for next year and the following year. Many of them are reviewing their
00:56property and land assets to see if they can realize value from them and perhaps
01:01using private sector partners to help them in getting sites allocated for
01:05housing and for delivery. So rather than the councils now intervening really
01:09early on in disposal of their assets they may well be looking to partners to
01:13support them to do that and that will raise receipts more quickly. So I think
01:17finances is a challenge for them and of course children's services and adult
01:21services are all under pressure and again we've listened to Steve earlier
01:25talking about how the private sector can help on that new health and well-being
01:29agenda which is a bit of a shift in some partners contributions to supporting
01:34local communities. So I think there's a lot of positive things to see and maybe
01:38a rebalancing between the relationships between public and private sector
01:42partners. You've come along to the event today but you said obviously you're a bit
01:46of a late addition because of some breaking news that you want to... Yes it
01:50was great to be invited. I was invited along because we broke the news
01:54that we've contracted a major joint-venture between Lloyds Banking
01:58Group, Barrett Developments and Homes England. It's called Made Partnership and
02:01it's going to be set up as a master developer to try and address the problem
02:05however in this country of how do we get these huge sites to deliver for our
02:09local authority partners at the pace and the quality and the level of
02:14sustainability that we need. So it's great to come along to being a really
02:18friendly group of people who are all really interested in partnerships because
02:22fundamentally this is all about how we can work together with others to deliver
02:25more than we can deliver on our own. Key takeaway from today are what fantastic
02:31progress there is across the Northwest that we're seeing and how there's some really
02:35really strong partnerships that are driving that forward but also that
02:39partnerships are evolving, emerging and really need commitment and focus but
02:46actually you're a fantastic way to deliver. We've heard many things today
02:49from people with many different agendas and show that it really is an exciting
02:57time for us all. Yep and there was obviously a few questions around
03:01politics today and what you know what that might mean for us going forward. Are
03:07there any anything that you've taken away or any insights you can share on
03:11on that and your position? Yeah obviously I think what we can take from today is
03:15that there's a the political changes which are ongoing at the moment there's
03:19a lot of research and consideration going on at the moment and a desire to
03:24really drive and make progress. There will be changes I think there's what
03:28we've learned will come out of that but I think the other side of that we need to
03:31have trust, we need to have certainty, we need to have flexibility going forward.
03:35As a private sector entity we are going to invest we need to know that that can
03:39be done on a long-term footing and ensure that you know any decisions we're
03:44taking now will not be overruled by political changes going forward but I
03:49think the in-depth research that's going on will be really helpful and we look
03:51forward to seeing what the outcome of that is and any changing I suppose
03:56guidance that comes through.