Office Vacancy - data, evidence and opportunity

This article interrogates the Government's (DCLG, 2013) announcemen,of permitted development rights for office to residential conversion and reviews the availability and reliability of data to quantify and identify the extent of office vacancy in England and Wales. It argues that the announcement can be positive in certain circumstances, although this is contested and currently difficult to evidence, while available vacant property data resources are variable in quality and often difficult to access

Realigning the built environment

Conversion and adaptation are essential to keeping pace with a dynamic real estate market, argue Dr Kevin Muldoon-Smith and Dr Paul Greenhalgh

Passing the buck without the bucks- some reflections on fiscal decentralisation and the business rate retention strategy in England

Kevin and Paul reflect on the intricacies and potential impacts of the government’s drive toward fiscal decentralisation and independence. They focus on the government’s Business Rate Retention Strategy (BRRS) and its consequences for local authorities in contrasting locations

COVID-19 has emphasised the importance of the local state – but how to solve a problem like local government funding?

The funding resilience of English local authorities has been a concern for some time, but COVID-19 has thrown such concerns into sharper relief, write Mark Sandford and Kevin Muldoon-Smith

Taking Stock: An Investigation into the Nature, Scale and Location of Secondary Commercial Office Vacancy in the UK and an Appraisal of the Various Strategies and Opportunities for its Management and Amelioration

There has been little comprehensive investigation of secondary office vacancy in the UK, nor its potential management or amelioration. In response, this thesis is a study of the nature, scale and location of this situation and an appraisal of the various strategies for its management and amelioration. There are three strands of research. An investigation into the nature, scale and location of secondary commercial office vacancy in the UK. An appraisal of potential management strategies and the development of policy recommendations in relation to the potential amelioration of this situation. An appraisal of the literature was conducted to develop an initial theoretical interpretation of secondary office vacancy. A multi attribute database of commercial office vacancy was then developed to evidence the stock of secondary office vacancy in the UK. Finally, a Delphi exercise was conducted to understand the underlying conditions of this phenomenon, its management and potential amelioration. Findings indicate that secondary office vacancy is ambiguous and colloquial. Vacant secondary office property exists in abundance while prime office property is in short supply. The institutions of the commercial office market over simplify and potentially disguise its manifestation. The incidence of secondary office vacancy is primarily caused by a structural change in the nature of demand. It can be held in reserve to support prime office supply, however, it can also overhang less buoyant locations. Consequently, the management strategies for secondary office vacancy are stratified, ranging from exploitation, to demand repositioning, to renewal and finally removal and redevelopment. Findings suggest that these management strategies should be predicated upon the demonstration of economic viability and mediated by the relative era of construction and underlying institutional characteristics. Finally, policy recommendations suggest that the amelioration of secondary office vacancy would be assisted by the promotion of more agile ways of working based on functional tolerance, and optionality

Planning Adaptation: Accommodating Complexity in the Built Environment

Obsolescence and vacancy are part of the traditional building life cycle, as tenants leave properties and move to new ones. Flux, a period of uncertainty before the establishment of new direction, can be considered part of building DNA. What is new, due to structural disruptions in the way we work, is the rate and regularity of flux, reflected in obsolescence, vacancy, and impermanent use. Covid-19 has instantly accelerated this disruption. Retail failure has increased with even more consumers moving online. While employees have been working from home, rendering the traditional office building in the central business district, at least temporarily, obsolete. This article reflects on the situation by reporting findings from an 18-month research project into the practice of planning adaptation in the English built environment. Original findings based on interviews with a national sample of local authority planners, combined with an institutional analysis of planning practice since the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, suggest that the discipline of planning in England is struggling with the reality of flux. There is a demand for planning to act faster, due to the speed of change in the built environment, and liberal political concerns with planning regulation. This is reflected in relaxations to permitted development rules and building use categories. However, participants also indicate that there is a concurrent need for the planning system to operate in a more measured way, to plan the nuanced complexity of a built environment no longer striated by singular use categories at the local level. This notion of flux suggests a process of perpetual change, turbulence, and volatility. However, our findings suggest that within this process, there is a temporal dialectic between an accelerating rate of change in the built environment and a concomitant need to plan in a careful way to accommodate adaptation. We situate these findings in a novel reading of the complex adaptive systems literature, arguing that planning practice needs to embrace uncertainty, rather than eradicate it, in order to enable built environment adaptation. These findings are significant because they offer a framework for understanding how successful building adaptation can be enabled in England, moving beyond the negativity associated with the adaptation of buildings in recent years. This is achieved by recognizing the complex interactions involved in the adaptation process between respective stakeholders and offering an insight into how respective scales of planning governance can coexist successfully

Grasping the nettle: the central–local constraints on local government funding in England

In England, the traditional method of central government redistribution and equalization between locations has been replaced with a greater emphasis on self-sufficiency and entrepreneurism. English local government now faces existential funding questions – a situation that is repeated around the world as the public sector manages the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. Financialization has figured large in the study of entrepreneurial behaviour. However, in England, legal and procedural constraints have driven authorities to seek revenue funding from other sources, principally seeking additional property-related revenues. In response, this article presents a novel typology of local government funding sources and offers an original analysis of their implications for local authorities’ role. The empirical findings show that the buoyancy and quantum of many funding sources are constrained by prior evolution of location and central–local relations: they are not automatic routes to financialization. Conceptually, these findings reveal that methods of financialization, and the local government funding system within which they typically sit, are as likely to be constrained by the evolution and techniques of governance as they are accelerated by it. International debates around financialization, and wider concerns of how locations develop, would benefit from this account of the often-hidden nature and agency of local government funding systems

Taking Stock: secondary opportunities and the agile future

The presentation shines a light on those parts of the commercial property market that no one talks about and asks the question: why, when we build buildings to last forever, do they become obsolete in a few years? We argue that office development and market conventions need to embed the concept of agility in order to benefit from the new economy

Civic Financialisation: constructing local welfare through property tax

The presentation covered the following themes: 1. what do we mean by civic financialisation? 2. Business Rates Retention Scheme 3. Influence of real estate markets 4. Importance of geography and economic structure 5. A better future: the rate escape 6. Summary & future researc

Devolution and the role of Commercial Real Estate Development

Presentation covers the following themes: 1. origin of project 2. how project was conducted 3. what has been produced 4. why it is importan