Telling Savills - Hands off our Housing
Savills is a well recognised brand on estate agent sale boards. They are a global real estate services provider, managing over £21 billion in property assets, and they turn a very healthy profit for their international shareholders by wheeling and dealing on the global property markets. What people may not be aware of is that Savills trade on their expertise and ‘research’ work, to directly influence public policy on land, housing and planning that affects us all.
How does that happen?
Firstly through consultancy work which Savills carry out for private developers as well as councils. Section 106, for example, relates to the statutory requirements on developers to provide a proportion of social housing on all new developments - Savills advise councils on what S106 money they can reasonably ask developers to pay. Despite this (or maybe because of this) those same developers can also pay Savills to advise them on the least amount of s106 money they can claim it is ‘viable’ for them to pay.
Savills do housing stock surveys for councils where they compile detailed information about the condition of their property, and then they go on to advise the private developers bidding for regeneration schemes on those estates. In their stock survey in Southwark, for example, it is clear that Savills used a property valuation system which was a barely disguised attack on the very existence of council housing. They determined the value of Southwark’s housing not just on the basis of how much it would cost to maintain or refurbish, but also based on the ‘sustainability’ of the estates, measured by their levels of poverty, crime and unemployment. These properties would therefore have been ‘valued’ much more highly if they were simply inhabited by rich people (rich people’s crimes in fraud, drugs, tax dodging etc. are not usually recorded on geographical crime statistics).
These valuations - determining that many estates on prime central London land had a zero or negative value - were then used to justify extensive regeneration schemes involving demolition and the transfer of land and property to private developers. ( see https://www.35percent.org/we-are-all-on-the-list/ ) So councils are actually paying Savills with public money to tell them how to help private developers access prime real estate that would otherwise remain out of their reach (because it is currently occupied by pesky council houses that purely benefit working class communities and don’t generate profit for anyone).
For Savills, part-privatisation of council housing during regeneration is actively pursued as a positive outcome for everyone, “fostering a wider social mix’, where presumably poor and feckless tenants can benefit from being in close proximity to aspirational and hard working home owners. https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/192155-0
No wonder the Government had to draft in an old Thatcherite like Michael Heseltine to oversee this war on the working class. In 2016 the government's Estate Regeneration Advisory Board, headed by Heseltine, included the head of London Residential Development at Savills, and was guided by the ambition that “estate regeneration has the potential to deliver thousands of net additional homes over the next 10 to 15 years.” These are of course additional private and unaffordable homes at the expense of the existing working class communities. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/heseltine-launches-panel-of-experts-to-kick-start-estates-regeneration
Which brings us to the second way Savills work in favour of developers and against council housing. Having positioned themselves as the expert consultants to councils they are then invited to take part in think tanks and government quangos to draw up favourable laws and funding schemes for future developments.
Back in 2014 the Grenfell Action Group were highlighting the corrupting influence of advisors like Savills, who greased the wheels of property deals between public authorities and the world’s property speculators at gatherings such as MIPIM - a yearly property fair usually held in Cannes in France. See https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/rbkc-and-savills-the-truth-they-dont-want-us-to-see/
At the time of that article the shameful and fatal consequences of allowing private developers to influence public bodies and push for relaxation of safety regulations, was yet to be fully understood. But it is now well past time that those lessons were learned and that we re-exert some kind of democratic control over our housing, our building regulations, our planning decisions and our safety standards.
For Savills, however, the Grenfell fire has just seemed to open up new money making opportunities. Savills now also market themselves as fire safety advisors and in the Packington estate for example, Savills is currently being paid to provide fire safety advice as well as profiting from directly providing the hugely expensive waking watch service that they themselves recommended. https://www.hyde-housing.co.uk/media/6219/packington-resident-qa-28-april-21.pdf
Savills is a private company which has a vested interest in pushing up the price of property and in providing property investment opportunities for its shareholders. They have openly campaigned for the privatisation of public land and the expansion of private developments at the expense of council housing.
They have no interest in protecting or expanding affordable housing and neither do they have any stake in protecting our environment through promoting refurbishment and retrofitting rather than demolishing and rebuilding. In fact they have a positive incentive not to recommend sustainable development models that do not create new private investment opportunities. They may pay lip service to the need for community engagement in regenerating estates but they are nonetheless only accountable to their shareholders not to residents or constituents.
They are not neutral experts who can be employed to provide advice that is beneficial to our communities or our environment.
In Lambeth, Savills were paid to help the council set up a new housing development company - Homes for Lambeth - and the relationships established then, have ensured that they continue to profit from ongoing consultation work for this £2billion tax-payer funded housing gamble. They have now been awarded a contract, worth up to £6.7 million, to do a full stock survey of council housing in Lambeth which will presumably reinforce the decision to demolish and redevelop at least six estates there.
There is a dangerous conflict of interest in allowing public housing or planning decisions to be influenced by private companies when we know that profit driven companies will seek to undermine any impediment to those profits - whether that’s building regulations, environmental standards or social housing quotas.
Sign the petition launched by Lambeth campaigners and get Savills hands off our housing.
https://www.change.org/p/mr-mark-ridley-savills-hands-off-our-housing
https://www.facebook.com/events/4683268491763649
https://twitter.com/savecentralhill/status/1478362819645132808?s=20