Why we should worry about the loss of London’s industrial land

I make no apology for picking up a subject on which I have written extensively in the past – and that is the importance of industrial land to London’s economy. This was brought home to me forcibly at a recent event at City Hall marking the halfway point in SEGRO’s delivery of a project called East Plus, which involved the development of some 86 acres of derelict industrial land across the Boroughs of Newham, Havering and Barking and Dagenham.

As you would expect, SEGRO, working in partnership with the GLA’s Land and Property Limited,  have done a great job and were duly lauded by the great and good of the GLA, the boroughs and many other local stakeholders. But that same audience then turned their attention to the plight of industrial land across London.

Deputy mayor Jules Pipe pointed out that 18% of London’s industrial land has been converted to other uses, mainly housing, since 2000. He also reminded the audience that as a result of the intervention of central government, the GLA was forced back in 2020 to amend the draft London Plan to remove the requirement that there should be no net loss of industrial land. In other words, it was OK to see industrial land turned into residential to meet the overriding need for housing.

While the need to do something about housing in London is obvious, this idea that it is industrial land conversion that offers the panacea is based on the government’s premise that most of the activities that take place in industrial facilities in London could actually be moved out of London, beyond the M25 – or, even better,  ‘up north’ to support the levelling up agenda.

This idea was most recently given further airtime by an extraordinary paper from the Centre for Policy Studies suggesting that Park Royal (pictured) – the industrial estate in West London which forms a sizeable part of the Old Oak and Park Royal Mayoral Development Corporation – could be sold for housing at a vast profit and the 2,000 businesses that reside there (not to mention the 40,000 employees) moved to alternative cheaper locations.

Fortunately, we were able to debunk this particular idiocy by pointing out that in Park Royal industrial land is worth more than residential land, but the fact that the idea gained some degree of traction in Ministerial circles just shows how deeply this anti-industrial, pro-housing rhetoric is entrenched.

The arguments against this policy are obvious. Moving industrial activity from its base in London would take the jobs with it. So, where exactly are the thousands of people employed in industrial facilities in London supposed to earn a living, since they are not all going to have the qualifications or indeed desire to work in the CAZ? And shipping back into London from beyond the M25 all the goods on which London depends is only going to add to environmental pressures.

Even if all incoming vans and lorries needed are electric, there simply wouldn’t be the road capacity to accommodate them. At a more philosophical level, wouldn’t London lose something as a city if its manufacturing and assembly facilities all disappeared leaving street after street of residential broken up only by the occasional chain of shops and eateries?

Apparently, these arguments are falling on deaf ears in central government, so we have got to get out there and start speaking up for the benefits of a genuine mixed-use city. We need a body to champion industrial land use, as the Centre for London recommended in its Industrial Land Commission report in 2022. We need a better PR strategy to explain to people why industrial land is so important.

We need real hard data that shows what the adverse environmental effects of shipping all our manufactures out beyond the M25 would be and why it would be so much more effective for it to remain in London. And we need to get creative about finding solutions that make better, more intensive use of a smaller amount of industrial land, freeing up space for that much needed housing but at the same time not losing industrial capacity. That means financial support and perhaps tax breaks for those pioneers embarking on multi-storey industrial or rationalisation of ageing and land-hungry single-storey facilities.

I am an enthusiast for keeping London as a genuine mixed-use city where people can both live and work at a whole range of jobs from basic manufacturing to investment banking. Of course we need to tackle the housing crisis, but not at the expense of the space needed for making and assembling the plethora of products the city needs to flourish. So, let’s speak out for industrial land – if we don’t, then we are in danger of losing it and with it a whole swathe of London’s unique character and economic success.