Peer review: Graeme Craig
Director of Commercial Development, TfL
The key realisation in developing our commercial strategy was that Transport for London is a property company. Of course, property will never be the most important thing we do, not when there are 30 million journeys on our network every day. We do, however, have 5,700 acres of land and over 400 potential development sites, so we are a property company whether we like it or not, and a large one at that.
It begins, of course, with the stations - the places that are (or should be) much more than where people get on and off trains. With more than four million journeys on just the Underground every day, stations are often the most convenient place for our customers to pick up the things they need, which is why we have rolled out ‹click and collect› at 43 stations in a little over a year.
The next step is to recognise that we can invest our assets to deliver the housing and employment that London needs. What is more, we are building on transport nodes, the very place where it is most efficient to place development. Integrating our commercial and operational plans, we can enhance our stations, providing step-free access and other improvements for both customers and staff. All this, while generating substantial revenues (over £1 billion from development alone) that we can reinvest back into the wider transport network.
The really interesting thing is that each station is not just an entrance to the rail network, each station also acts as a gateway to a different part of the capital. And that is important because London is not a single, uniform city. It is made up of multiple cities, towns and villages - and people’s experience of each part often starts when they get off a train onto one of our platforms.
While there must be a design that runs through the whole network, every station and every station development should ideally reflect the environment of that part of London. Customers should have a sense of where they are in London without seeing the station name.
To take forward over 50 development opportunities across the capital, we recently launched our Property Partnerships. We are looking for a small number of partners who will work with us over the next decade to deliver a series of developments that will transform London. Our objective is to deliver long-term income through high quality development, working alongside partners who care as much about London as we and our customers do.
We will need a range of partners, given that our potential developments include listed buildings with opportunity for residential conversion, mixed use and residential developments over stations and depots, major regeneration schemes in urban centres, and brownfield developments in inner and outer London. By having only a small number of partners, we can take learnings from project to project, and also build teams of people who get used to working together.
We do need to take the time to work through the right answer station-by-station. This builds on recent work where we had more than 1,700 local people involved over six months in helping us design a new development at the heart of Northwood.
With such a fantastic portfolio, the biggest mistake we could make is to forget that the reason why TfL exists is not to develop its property. Fortunately we have 30 million reminders every day that our primary goal is, and always will be, transport.
