The recently appointed chair of the Court of Governors at the Whitgift Foundation, the largest landowners in Croydon and the freeholders of the slowly deteriorating shopping mall in the town centre, says it was inevitable that the £1.4billion scheme promised by developers Westfield would need public financing to go ahead.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith is the latest interviewee for our podcast strand, Under The Flyover. As well as volunteering to chair the Court of Governors at the under-fire Whitgift Foundation, which was founded more than 400 years ago but is having to confront 21st Century global financial pressures, the Irishwoman is also the chief executive of L&Q, one of the country’s biggest housing associations.
So she is uniquely well-placed to offer insights into Croydon’s current housing crisis, as well as how what was originally presented as a vast new shopping centre to regenerate Croydon town centre has now shifted into a detail-lite “masterplan” proposing around 3,000 flats around where the Whitgift Centre stands today.
Fletcher-Smith was working at City Hall as an aide to Boris Johnson when he was London Mayor when the Westfield proposals for Croydon town centre were first unveiled in 2012. So she has been able to follow its progress – or lack of it – from the beginning.
In her Under The Flyover interview, Fletcher-Smith was asked how what was originally a billion-pound commercial scheme had somehow transformed into a public-private partnership, and where would the public cash be coming from.
“The first thing I’d say, and I base this on lots of experience around things like the Vauxhall Nine Elms development, Elephant and Castle redevelopment, and a lot of my time at City Hall, every major development is a partnership between the public and the private sector in some way or other. It has to be.
Vacant possession: the Whitgift Centre is mostly empty of shops, and of shoppers
“And I have to say that I’m so impressed with Croydon’s growth strategy. We saw Mayor Perry announce that a couple of weeks ago, and it’s really great stuff.
“He’s personally leading and championing that, which is great to see, because that partnership really matters. And it’s a partnership in terms of the local authorities setting some very clear parameters around planning, but also there are some things within that.
“So, if I’m asking that local authorities consider social and affordable housing as part of their planning policy, that [means] subsidised housing.”
After a career in the public housing sector, now with L&Q, Fletcher-Smith has a close grasp of what it costs to deliver new homes. “So for social rented housing, if we say it costs an average half a million [pounds] to build a social rent home, which is land, construction costs, everything else, the grant you get from the GLA or from Homes England, the government, the Greater London Authority, whoever you get the grant from, it will usually will cover about £100,000 to £150,000-worth of that.
“So there’s always public money going in some way.
“If you look at Vauxhall Nine Elms, the extension to the Northern Line that made the Battersea Power Station redevelopment happen, was really, again, it was a public-private partnership with some of the uplift in taxation being paid locally in business rates being used to fund part of that work to build the Northern Line.
“So the idea that anything is ever purely public or purely private is a very sort of old-fashioned idea. These always have to be done together.
“And what’s brilliant about the way Croydon Council are leading this at the minute is they see us in the Foundation working closely with URW [Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield] as enablers for what we’re all, as a local resident, we are all patiently waiting to happen.
“We see our role as enabling partner has been key part of what the Foundation does.”
And in the interview, Fletcher-Smith underscored how the Whitgift Foundation depends on its income from its property portfolio to continue to fund its charity work, with its care homes and burseries for children attending its three (soon to be two) large fee-paying independent schools.
“What we’d like is some form of partnership with URW that enables us to continue financing bursaries to continue to look at what we do for care of older people in Croydon. We can’t do that if we simply hand over all our assets.
“But the one thing I can assure you is that we will be pragmatic and hopefully innovative in how we work with both the council and URW to make it happen.
“You know, I was shopping in a North End on Friday afternoon and, you know, you can feel it. It’s coming. Something’s going to happen there.
“Something is coming there and there’s this sense that it’s real this time.”
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Read more: Perry’s council endorses scheme for 3,000 flats in town centre
Read more: Westfield boss says Croydon scheme could take 15 more years
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