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Newcastle Helix Estates Director John Seager shares his thoughts...
It was an absolute pleasure to meet Legal and General’s new Group CEO António Simões last week at Newcastle Helix and showcase some of the fantastic things that are being achieved here. The breadth of his experience and immediate understanding about our purpose and vision was great to see. It really highlighted the importance of building connections and partnership that match aspirations for investment, the kind that is ready to go on a journey and help achieve a long-term vision for the region.
To kick off the day Legal & General announced the launch of a new £1 million fund to help improve health equity in the North East, aimed at supporting community-based projects that tackle societal issues. This followed the recent announcement of the North East region's first Local Growth Plan under the leadership of Mayor Kim McGuinness. L&G's Social Impact and Investment Director, Pete Gladwell and Head of Social Impact Investment Julia Goldsworthy shared insights into the number of expressions of interests they had already received. Meetings and tours of Newcastle Helix followed this announcement including many of those involved in Newcastle Helix including Jane Robinson, Ben Rodgers, and Michelle Percy FRICS.
There was very obviously plenty of discussion about attracting investment to the region and, more importantly, the right kind of investment that has impact. The “we’re open for business” tag line for the region should not ignore the need to ensure that we have a minimum set of expectations from all investors that is appropriate to achieving our ambitions around inclusivity and sustainability.
This is certainly the case when it comes to regeneration, placemaking and investment, anyway. In those cases, if you want to do something transformational, you’ll have to approach everything a bit differently. And that’s why it’s so great to have an investor like Legal and General as part of the Newcastle Helix partnership
Not everyone thinks like that. Traditional thinking works on the basis that there is a broad sense of where the best development opportunities are in a particular area. The temptation, or typical thought, is to attract any investment by using what’s already going on around there – “you’ll be well-connected, you’ll be near other development, you’ll have access to X, Y or Z, there are other similar things that have been successful”
What you’re trying to do with that is sort of tell the story of a place, but it’s inherently backward looking. It can work well where you’re trying to build on past success, adding a few more building blocks on top of your tower, but if you’re trying to do something transformative, then it’s not enough.
It’s also not enough to put together your proposition and then court any investor who shows an interest - sometimes you need the right investor for the right project.
That means doing your prep work first.
I’ve done lots of that over the years with the many projects I’ve been involved with, and I think there are three fundamental elements to it.
You need to get the right people in place - the right partners - often spanning multiple sectors.
You need to know what your mission is and make sure it’s one which works for everyone.
You need to get the story right and tell it in a way which attracts the kind of attention, and the kind of investment, you want.
The success of Newcastle Helix has come as a result of getting all of those elements right.
The engagement team we have put together with Charlie Charlton, Chris Taylor and Natalie Eminae live and breath our vision and in Legal & General , Newcastle University and Newcastle City Council we have a set of partners who are all focused on the long term, and all bought into the mission of the site.
It’s an easy mission to grasp too - an innovation district where we address some of the biggest challenges facing the city and the region, while being a thriving business community and a commercial success too.
People can sometimes dismiss big, external investment as inevitably resulting in people at cross-purposes - they’ve got their goals, you’ve got yours.
But if you can articulate the mission, and tell the story right, then the success comes from everyone pulling in the same direction.
The reality is that if you have a grand vision, you’ll often need the heavy lifting to come from elsewhere - you simply won’t be able to achieve as much alone as you’d be able to with outside support.
The sweet spot is when you have a locally-defined vision, being delivered by local providers, and benefiting local people, while also helping an investor meet their goals.
That needs effective management.
I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have been involved in a host of roles over my career where that’s gone really well.
I spent over 12 years at Gateshead based UK Land Estates, working with a motivated and trusted team as part of a public private partnership, delivering all sorts of developments from award winning business parks to refurbishing older industrial properties and everything in between. Because of our long term investment, the relationships that we built up with every single occupier were meaningful and relevant, we celebrated their business successes and were also there to assist through more difficult times if necessary.
I took these learnings into my role as CEO of Siglion, the Sunderland public private regeneration company, getting development started at the former Vaux Brewery site, where others had failed for more than 2 decades of stalemate. We also transformed a massively underperforming publicly owned commercial property portfolio into robust and profit producing assets that still provide a great revenue stream to the local authority.
You can see the same process at Newcastle Helix, which continues to hugely benefit from local intelligence and old hands delivering efficiently and effectively on a combined long term vision.
Each project has been very different, with different characteristics and desired outcomes. What they all had in common was that planning had started early to prepare for investment, we defined a clear shared vision, and that the process was managed in a hands-on way, not just through the development phase but into the lifecycle of the site too.
Good asset and partnership management seeks out connections and ways to add value, and it comes with an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the place it’s working in, coupled with a clear view of how any given asset sits within the future vision for that place.
As it stands, the North East is a fairly leaky region when it comes to investment, with just 43.4% of the investment which enters the country via the region staying in the region.
The bulk of that onward investment is into other parts of the UK - 95.2% in fact - suggesting we’re an attractive entry point, but we’re not doing the best job selling the region and making investment sticky.
We’ve got to do better at that in the North East, and projects like Newcastle Helix are at the centre of being able to achieve that. It’s a place that has done its prep work, got its story straight and is matched to the right kind of investment by understanding what the shared vision is at an early stage, and not forgetting that. If we want to achieve long term goals we have to focus on the right kind of long term partnerships.
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