Go for growth: Croydon, the Whitgift Centre and Westfield could discover some momentum for the long-delayed redevelopment in the Labour government’s fresh approach
Does the growth-driven agenda of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves’s Labour government offer any change of fortune for Croydon? ANDREW FISHER, pictured right, weighs up the possibilities
It should have been all so different: “Croydon’s future secured with agreement to redevelop town centre” the press release from Mayor of London Boris Johnson’s office declared in 2013.
The then Conservative-led Croydon Council, including cabinet member Jason Perry, and the then Conservative MP for Croydon Central, Gavin Barwell, all claimed their share of credit, too, but the shopping centre originally scheduled to have opened in 2017 has never materialised, while developers Westfield have long seemed to be looking to exit from their commitments.
Some of us were sceptical from the off. The growth in online retailing had already been eating into high street businesses for a decade or more by the time that the redevelopment of Croydon’s Whitgift and Central shopping centres was proposed in 2013. Some badly conceived plans also made it a dubious proposition even then.
Nearly 12 years on, and Croydon’s town centre has definitely been transformed, but no one would argue for the better.
After two rounds of planning applications, public inquiries and CPOs, the proposed £1.4billion Hammerson and Westfield scheme is dead and buried. But last year Westfield said they would reveal a new “masterplan” for Croydon, though not until 2025, and that it might take until 2038 to deliver. What’s a 21-year delay between friends?.
But could the change of government, with its urgent emphasis on growth, make a difference in breathing new life into Croydon town centre – accelerating or even improving those plans?
Here’s five ways in which it could.
Business rate reform
Shop plan: Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, wants to adjust business tax
Before the General Election, the Labour Party’s manifesto promised that they “will replace the business rates system, so we can raise the same revenue but in a fairer way. This new system will level the playing field between the high street and online giants”.
So more Amazon warehouses will pay more tax and high street shops will pay less.
Reducing the cost of doing business on the high street might save some and might also incentivise others to invest in places like Croydon – heaven knows there’s a lot of scope for that with all the empty retail units in the town centre…
It’s likely that Labour will want to move swiftly on this, with an announcement in the autumn budget, if not before. That could help attract more retail back to the town centre, but also shift the balance of Westfield’s updated proposals
Planning regulations
The new Labour government’s No1 mission is to achieve the highest sustained growth among major western economies. Last year, the UK lumbered in in sixth place out of the G7, and after a decade-and-a-half of anaemic growth, Labour is keen to kickstart economic expansion.
Its main remedy for that is planning reform – whether that’s for energy infrastructure (the Cameron-era ban on onshore wind is already gone) or housing, but presumably also major projects like town centre regeneration.
Westfield’s last set of plans for Croydon included nearly 1,000 new homes, and they have been busy moving into the residential sector increasingly with their other London shopping centres, at Stratford and Shepherds Bush.
Housing targets
All change: a decade ago, most of this was going to be redeveloped into mainly retail. Residential development is likely to figure in any new plan
Labour has said it will restore the housing targets which compelled councils to set local targets and to identify sites for extra housing. To help with this, Labour has promised to fund 300 extra planning officers across English councils.
The Conservative government, elected in 2019, promised to build 300,000 homes a year. It never got close in any single year. Labour made the same pledge this year. Let’s see if they can deliver.
The key thing will be delivering genuinely affordable homes and council homes. England has more families living in temporary accommodation that ever before, but Labour has announced no target for council housebuilding.
New colleges
Labour has promised to “transform Further Education colleges into specialist Technical Excellence Colleges” to “work with businesses, trade unions, and local government to provide young people with better job opportunities and the highly trained workforce that local economies need”.
It has also promised to come forward with a “post-16 skills strategy”.
This potentially could be good news for Croydon College and the town centre campus of London South Bank University. Should extra money be delivered for further and higher education, the number of empty units on Wellesley Road and in the town centre make expansion of institutions in Croydon viable – bringing more people into the town centre.
Civil service jobs
Home Office’s office: 2 Ruskin Square will accommodate 5,000 civil servants once ready for use later this year
The last Labour government moved civil service jobs out of central London to Croydon, and it’s quite conceivable that more could follow. The Ruskin Square development next to East Croydon Station is already home to a large HMRC office, and in a month’s or so’s time, the Home Office is to relocate 5,000 staff from four older office blocks in central Croydon into a new building nearby.
Croydon’s multiple empty office blocks now offer an opportunity for more relocations – and almost certainly at lower cost than central London accommodation.
More jobs being brought into Croydon means more footfall in the town centre – whether that’s in the public or private sectors – and will only make town centre regeneration more attractive.
Council funding
This is the trickiest of all areas – and probably the area where the new government is weakest.
Not-very-executive Mayor: Jason Perry hiked Council Tax, but hasn’t fixed the finances
Councils have collapsed all over the country, many more are on the brink and years of austerity will need to be unwound.
In his letter to the new Secretary of State for local government, Jason Perry, our not-very-executive Mayor (though he is still paid as if he is) admitted that Croydon’s finances won’t be fixed without government intervention. Something we all knew when his Conservative colleagues in the department were ignoring his previous pleas while and approving his and Jason Cummings’ decision to hike our Council Tax by 15% (which did nothing to fix the finance).
We all need a functioning council that can lead and co-ordinate, not an empty shell being directed by Whitehall to sell-off assets.
Funding is urgent – and for Croydon’s sake, the new government must succeed where its predecessor failed.
- From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn. Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes
Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:
- The fundamental dishonesty around this dog-whistle election
- Bringing the parties to book: manifestos are empty of promise
- Splash and purge: just another five weeks of campaigning to go
- ‘Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others!’
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
Business rates:
“So more Amazon warehouses will pay more tax and high street shops will pay less.”
I read the bit about levelling the playing field in the manifesto, yet – unless Andrew (quite possibly) has better information than me – saw nothing about the high street paying less.
No Government (yet) relinquishes revenue, so we might realistically expect a formula that brings Amazon’s costs into line with the high street, rather than making the high street a less expensive place to trade. Fairer, but not cheaper.
Planning:
Not sure planning reform will make much difference to the Whitgift Centre, as one would expect the LBC to wave through pretty much anything Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield ask of them.
On the upside, the addition of (a lot of) flats to the mix is not necessarily a bad thing, given the change in shopping practices and the way high streets are used.
If we’re lucky, we could (should?) end up with an enhanced version of the Brunswick Centre with retail and NTE businesses orientated towards the needs of the residents upstairs.
The Brunswick isn’t perfect. When I spoke to architect Patrick Hodgkinson about it years ago, he made the point that Camden bodged it and it wasn’t delivered as envisaged.
However, it has been revived recently and is a decent example of a starting point for mixed-use town centre development.
New colleges:
Labour has promised to “transform Further Education colleges into specialist Technical Excellence Colleges” to “work with businesses, trade unions, and local government to provide young people with better job opportunities and the highly trained workforce that local economies need”.
This is crucial.
Enough studentification (which, among other things, also fucks local housing markets) already, and more education and training to address the skills shortages that abound.
For instance, there’s no way housing targets will be met without massively ramping up the number of necessary trades to deliver them. In the construction industry alone, we are woefully short of qualified, skilled people – about 250,000 short by current reckoning.
Council funding:
Pessimistically, it’ll be 10% annual Council Tax rises all round, and no need to ask nicely to impose them. Not that that will be anywhere near sufficient to get Croydon out of its hole though.
We already know that, from the council’s mid-term plan which includes details of the next £38m bail-out, for blatant personal and political advantage, Perry is looking at a 0% Council Tax increase ahead of the 2026 local elections.
That makes the whole approach appear like an abuse of power
A retail centre doesn’t have to be just an uninspiring bigger version of the Whitgift Centre with just a couple of hundred bland shops. For example, West Edmonton Mall was built when the population wasn’t much more than Croydon’s and is one of the biggest in the world. It offers a lot more than just shops and tens of millions go there every year for a day out. My point is you don’t need to build piles of flats on top things to make it work, you just have to build something good that people want to go to.
If this so-called Westfield masterplan ever comes to light I’m almost dreading it because I expect it to fall well below par but a lot of people will have the attitude, better than the dump it is now and accept it rather than question it and see it as a missed opportunity. But that’s the situation of a company holding a town to ransom, they don’t have to build anything good.
One key factor which has been overlooked in this story of misplaced but understandable hope, is that the management team and governors at the John Whitgift Foundation have not changed and carry on regardless. Least we forget that the current cadre at the JWF is the same team, which includes property experts, that has been intricately involved with the entire ‘redevelopment’ process that we have had to witness in the town centre.
It is not fully appreciated how influential the JWF is to the prosperity of Croydon and its environment and yet it has little to no accountability to the community that it is meant to serve. If Croydon is to be redeveloped and improve, which it absolutely must, it is imperative that amongst other things, there is a change in the leadership of the JWF.
Nail on the head there.