S2 Ep2: Sir William Worsley and Avril Roberts | The need for community engagement in rural masterplanning

Hello and welcome to Estate Matters, the podcast brought to you by Core Communications, the country's leading public relations consultancy specializing in landed estates and rural businesses. We work with clients across the UK to raise awareness and nurture support and advocacy for their work. This podcast is all about discussing the challenges they face and how effective communications can help. I'm your host Anna Biles, a broadcaster of 20 years and now a rural affairs specialist at Core Communications. In this episode of Estate Matters we are joined by Sir William Worsley from Hovingham Estate in Yorkshire and the CLA's senior policy advisor Avril Roberts. Welcome to Estate Matters both. Morning. Morning. So, Sir William, I'm keen to start with you really to tell us a little bit more about the estate in terms of the makeup of the land and the property and its activity. Well, the estate is very much a family business. We have quite a big farming operation, a big forestry operation and that's what we are in many ways particularly proud of. We've been managing our woods for the same basic strategy for 130 years. We've got quite a big residential and commercial property portfolio. We've got a hotel, we've got a quarry and we've got a very large and somewhat expensive historic house and historic buildings that we have to look after. And how long have you been actively involved in the the management of the estate? This is going to make me sound frightfully old because but I did start very very, when I was very very young. I've been involved in running this estate for about 35 years and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. But I've also, during that time, had a large number of jobs outside. So running the estate is a part-time role in order to make money because an estate like this isn't a business that produces a huge surplus. I'm afraid it almost all gets reinvested back into it. So I've always had jobs in order to that I can go on holiday and have nice cars and all that sort of thing. Tell us a little bit about some of those other roles because probably are they roles that complement your your ownership and running of the estate? Some have been, some less. I've been involved in financial services. I was a director of Guinness Malm Private Bank. I've been very involved in building societies. I chaired the Scarborough Building Society. I sat on the board of the Skippton Building Society. But also I've been very involved with the CLA. I was president about 10 years ago and so that's obviously very much related to the estate. I chaired the National Forest Company. I was the government's tree champion and I currently chair the Forestry Commission. So those later jobs are very much involved alongside with what I do here. But not all the early ones. They were about trying to make some money. I know lots of estate owners aren't involved in the active management of their estates but why is it important to you that you you are involved? I'm very much involved. I think that having a hands-on approach is really important. I mean I have to say I don't do everything. I'm a good delegator. I'm not a believer that you should meddle. I believe you should get really good people to work with and empower them. So I try and do that but I am very much a hands-on land manager. And over those 35 years that you've been actively involved, what have been some of the biggest changes that you sort of have happened on the estate? I think the biggest change, I mean in most of our businesses the number of employees has declined. If I look at my farming operation when I took over the farm and I was 23 when I took over the farm here, we employed four people. We now employ three people on a farm four times the size. I look at my forestry business. When I was a child we employed 12 people. When I took it over we employed four people. Now we don't employ anybody and we bring it outside and everything is done by machinery. The only side of the business that's grown is the office because the administrative costs of running an estate has increased. The amount of work one does on important things like health and safety does require administrative time. So whereas when I first took over, I had a part-time land agent and I had a single person in the office. Now we've got two and a half people in the office and that's the one bit that's grown. I'm fascinated in a moment, William, to learn more about the estate's master plan but Avril, I just wanted to come to you now and find out more about your role at the CLA and what that involves. So I'm a senior policy advisor for the CLA covering housing and tourism. So most of my role is policy work and working with government to make sure that their policies are effective for our members. We also, as part of the CLA membership, we give our members advice. So when they come to us with questions about how they, for example, with me, it's how they might want to deliver some housing or manage what they've got already, we will take that advice that we've given our members to inform our policy work. So it's a very varied role and it will depend what the government of the day is doing but it's also really driven by our members' needs as well. And how did you get into that role? So I've always been somewhat interested in housing. When I was, I grew up about 12 miles north of Cambridge, not far from Ely in Cambridgeshire. And with being 12 miles north of Cambridge as a big affordability challenge and it's getting worse, when I was a teenager my dad established a community land trust in our village which he's still chair of. So I was, I was sort of involved in that from being a teenager and off to, to university to study politics, thinking that I was going to be housing minister and solve the challenges that way. And then I did a graduate scheme in a housing association based in West London and was doing housing development there. And then I was at home one Christmas and saw the CLA job advertised and I only really knew of the CLA from when they used to run the game fair. And questioned why they were advertising for a housing advisor role and looked into it and thought that it looked quite good and got me back into doing some more politics things. And my dad essentially told me to apply and here I am three years later. So it was, it was all a bit, all a bit quick but it's, yeah, where I wanted to be doing rural housing and more on the politics and policy side as well. Wow. So how do you sort of in practical terms work with an estate like Hovingham, for example? So it depends on, on where the estate is. So occasionally an estate like Hovingham will come to us and we're working with them by just learning from them. So somewhere like Hovingham has done a lot in this space already. So actually we're just finding out where their successes have been, where their failures have been and where the challenges have been. Other estates are right at the beginning of a journey like that and so we're helping them by giving them advice. So perhaps talking them through the planning process or perhaps what their options might be for if it is delivering housing. And other estates are really quite passive in their engagement with us. So we do, we give a lot of advice through our magazine, Land and Business, through blogs on our website, through podcasts, we have a podcast as well. And so we're trying to get out information to our members in that way. So Sir William, I'm keen to find out a bit more about your master plan. Why is it that you have your own master plan and just explain a bit more about what is, what's in that document? Well, as I said, I've been involved in many different businesses. I've chaired a number of boards and I think a master plan or a strategy document is absolutely essential for any business. It doesn't matter whether it's a rural estate, a financial services business, a forestry business or whatever. A master plan, a strategy document is absolutely key. We've always had a master plan on this estate, certainly since I took over running it. I think it's key because it gives you a clear direction both to clarify your own mind as to where the estate is going, but also so you bring all the people you're working with along with you. And when one's talking about an estate, there's a lot of people that are interested in what's going on under the estate. There are people that live on it. There are people that live nearby it. And I think it's very important that you have good communication. What people don't like is being shocked by suddenly being told something is going to happen. If they are aware of that things are going to happen, what's going to happen, and why things are happening, it's usually much easier to achieve things. I know that your home, Hovingham Hall, is very much at the heart of the village. So what is your relationship like with that local community who have that shared interest in the estate and its activities? Well, I think, I mean, Hovingham Hall is right on the edge of the village. It's unusual for a large historic house to be quite as part of the village as Hovingham Hall is. I think it's really, really important. We care deeply about our community. I've always seen our role as giving leadership to the village, as stewardship of the village. I'm really proud of what has been achieved. We have a wonderful, vibrant living community here. We've got lots of things going on. We have a wonderful monthly village market. We've got a vibrant church. We've got wonderful village facilities. We've got a village shop that has actually grown. Most village shops are closing. Our village shops double in size. So, you know, it's about engaging with your community, working with your community, listening to what your community says, and trying to get them on side so that they understand what you're doing. So I see it as our role with the village and ensuring that it is very much a living community. It's really, really important. How challenging can that be? Because so many estates deliver lots of that, what we would now call social value. And it's not always recognised that the estate might be behind some of those sort of key elements of community that you described there. Is it hard sometimes to sort of, I mean, I don't want to say win hearts and minds, but let people know that the estate is sort of the driving force behind some of those aspects of their community? It is hard. There's no question. Getting your communications right is not easy. It's really important. What is terribly important is not to be seen as sort of living behind a big stone wall. It's about being accessible. It's about being involved with village things that are going on. I mean, we have a cricket ground. The village cricket ground is on our front lawn. And I'm not a cricketer. I have to admit, I'm afraid I'm not actually even that interested in cricket. But I support it strongly and they play every weekend. And that's part of the sort of thing that we can do. We also own all the land around the village. We still own quite a lot of property in the village. And therefore, our engagement and the way we work with the parish council, for example, is terribly, terribly important. And in the time that you've been sort of actively involved with the estate, have you embarked on any sort of major projects which have been controversial? Yes. And I've learned a lot as I've gone on. And one of the things that I commented on a bit earlier is it's about not shocking people. So letting people know the thinking. I mean, we've done a number of developments over my time. We're looking at a reasonably large development at the moment. And we've had consultations with the village. We've had presentations, so both and we've always started by talking to the parish council. So they feel involved and their leadership role has been important. But we've had a number of meetings in the village. And what I'm talking about is as displays so people can come and talk. I'm not keen on the sort of village meeting where everyone goes into a room and the few people that are anti-hijacked meeting. I'm talking about proper consultations with people so that they can come, ask the questions, talk, understand what you're trying to do. Avril, you must see a lot of this in your job, the challenge of when you are embarking on a project, particularly when we're talking about sizeable projects of communicating what it is you're trying to achieve and why. We do and I think there's a definite challenge with in the past where development has been delivered and the communication and the consultation has been a placard event in the village hall where the scheme's already been designed. And I think where schemes have been done like that in the past by whoever has done them, usually private developers that have come in, I think that's put a bad taste in some areas' mouths and our members are still dealing with the challenges of that. There's many instances where members have come to us and said I've tried to deliver this development and I've engaged in a really good way with the community. But they still remember 25 years ago when the houses down the road were delivered with none. And that legacy, it's not just our members that remember the legacy of the village and care about the legacy, it's also the people that live there. So it's an opportunity to engage with the communities of that but it is also a challenge. I was just going to say for estates like Hovingham, which are family-run, is there not a really good opportunity that where a family has been in a location for generations and built up hopefully a good reputation with their local community? Is that not an opportunity for estates like Williams, where they can use the family name to demonstrate that they do care deeply about their local community and will deliver what we would call a legacy development? I think there are two things here. One is we're not the normal standard developer that does development and walks away. If we get it wrong, we are tired with that for the next couple of generations. So past performance is really, really important. We care very deeply about getting it right. So if we're doing a development, we design it. If we're going to sell it, we sell with plans, which we then monitor so we can ensure that we are protecting and improving the community. And I think that's really important. And I think people do look at what you've done in the past. And if you've got it wrong, that's going to come back and haunt you. So William and I met with, along with some other CLA members, and it's one of the ways we engage with our members and government. We had a focus group with the Ministry for Housing Communities and Local Government just last week. And one of the things that we were talking about was that stewardship approach to development. It's not always the community that our members have to demonstrate that they will not do the wrong thing. It's often the planners as well. And they can perhaps be a bit more distant. They might not be, have been in post for as long a time as the community that's there. So you can do all the positive engagement with the community, but engaging with the local authority and the planners is just as important. And actually, this is a question for both of you. I know where you are in Yorkshire, you're, I think, under one of the new unitary authorities, which we'll see more of. Does that bring challenges, Avril? It does. The instability of a change like that is really good. Not least, because there will be some good local authority officers lost through that process. There'll be other new people coming in. There's particularly where we see a shift to a unitary. There's less focus on local, where you've got sort of smaller districts. They tend to know the district, whereas with a unitary, they could be a bit more, more distant. So that is a challenge. And I don't know how successful William's engagement with them has been so far. We had a round table at the Great Yorkshire Show last year that we both attended. And I think one of the challenges that was picked up was whether there will be an interest in smaller rural sites when the unitary is going to have such large housing targets. We have a good relationship with the local planners. I have to say from our own perspective, the Ridell District Council, which was the local district council that's now gone, was doing their development plan. They failed to get it completed before it all was combined in the North Yorkshire Council. And they've gone back to scratch again, so it's going to take five years or so before the next plan's in place. That's not really good enough. I think that we need to have a plan that's in place that we can get on with. And I think constant going back to scratch is going to be problematic. And if you look at the new government or the current government's approach to planning, they want houses built, they want to get on with it in this Parliament. And they're going to force local authorities, build houses, if they haven't got a proper plan in place, not necessarily going to be done right. I sat on the North Yorkshire Rural Commission, which was looking, a whole of North Yorkshire, looking at a lot of different areas, one of which was planning. And I have to say rural housing and rural planning has been one of my great interests, along with forestry, which is another of my sort of passions, forestry in the environment. And getting it done right is really important. The easy thing is to build houses on the edge of local towns. But in North Yorkshire, that's already been done. And you've seen huge developments on the edge of towns. We need to look at how we sensibly build houses and villages, improving not attracting from the village. Avril, do you think that's something we will see now, the approach Sir Williams just described? I think it's still up in the air. I think absolutely it's something that the CLA is pushing for is a small number of homes in a large number of villages, with the 1.5 million homes that need to be, or the target of delivering 1.5 million homes in the next five years or 10 years, or it keeps changing when they've said it will be by. That presents a real challenge, because when you're going to a local authority with a site of perhaps four or five, the time that it takes them to approve that is the same time that it can take them to approve 150. So unless we have proper resourcing, I think we're going to have a challenge with smaller rural sites. What we are without being completely overly negative, what we are seeing from this government is more interest in what's going wrong, and why aren't these sites coming forward. We were getting some traction with the previous government on that as well. But so when people like the CLA, William, when he's going through the North York rural commission, and saying why these sites are so hard to deliver, I think they're listening to us more now. And once they've, this government, have forwarded their plans for new towns, then we'll see more focus coming to these small sites. I know a big part of your job, Admiral, is looking at sort of affordable housing. How difficult is it for a state so when we're talking about these smaller developments, sort of dotting a few houses on the periphery of villages, to include sort of social housing provision within those plans? It's very difficult. There's two ways you can do it usually, or three ways. So occasionally, it will be what's the housing will be delivered on what's called a rural exception site, which is generally primarily for affordable housing. They're difficult to bring forward because they are an exception site. So the exception being that the site is given planning permission because it's delivering affordable housing. Otherwise, the site wouldn't be given planning permission. So that's a obstacle to overcome. Another challenge is that in most rural locations, if you're delivering sites of 10 or less homes, you don't have to deliver any affordable housing on those sites unless the local authority has a specific policy in place to take some affordable housing on those sites. Where that presents a challenge is finding a housing provider, so a housing association or something similar, who take on the management of perhaps just two or three homes is really difficult. What we're seeing in the social sector, which is impacting our members, is housing associations wanting to take on sites of at least 10 or in some cases 15 homes. And the smaller numbers are just not financially viable for them to deliver themselves. The other way our members can do it is deliver the site and deliver a contribution to for affordable housing to be delivered elsewhere. The difficulty then with that is that it usually gets soaked up in developments, as William said, on the edge of towns where there can be larger numbers of affordable housing. So it's incredibly difficult. It's not just the management of the homes, but the financing of those. There are ways that our members have done it, whether they financed it themselves because they see the benefit that some affordable housing can bring to their community. But it definitely is a challenge. It's difficult. I'm thinking back to something William said at the very beginning, which is you've always propped up your job, if you like, as a state manager with other roles because of the nature of the estate needing to pay for itself. And it's very difficult if we're then talking about building a few houses and then having to allocate some of those as social housing. If that's the difference of that development paying or not paying, then that's a very difficult decision, William, isn't it? Well, if the development doesn't pay, it won't be done. And I think that's an absolute key thing that people must remember. There needs to be something for everybody. The developer needs to make money. The land end needs to make money. And the houses need to be affordable. And that's a really difficult one, particularly if you have to build with high quality architectural design using the local vernacular, which I think is really important. So it's not an easy one. I mean, we have achieved affordable housing and developments we've done here. The key thing I think with affordable housing is to build them within the development so that you have large houses, small houses, all integrated together. So there's no stigma attached to something that is affordable as opposed to the rich man's house next door. And one of the things I've always tried to do is to design better houses for the affordable ones because then they really don't stand out. I'm always very aware of the, which was very successful at the time, the post war council housing development where Macmillan achieved all the targets, but they just built houses on the edge of villages. We've got them here. We've got some, and they're still called the council houses, even though most are owner occupied and they've been owner occupied for decades. So getting affordable housing in rural development schemes is a real challenge. It's not easy. It can happen, but it needs to be in sensible numbers because if isn't the money in the development, it won't come forward. And we've seen that if you look back historically, every time an extra tax like development land tax was brought in, it stopped the supply of land for housing. And as a land owner, you only have a small amount of potential development and you need to make sure it works and works properly. I mean, as I said, we've got a large heritage asset on the estate and it's very, very expensive. And if state needs to make the money in order to sustain, if the heritage assets all had to be taken over by the state or the national trust or whoever, it would be a huge challenge to the nation to do that. Something you mentioned there, William, about sort of building with a local vernacular, do you think there is a risk now that to meet the government's current housing targets, we move away from that idea of building beautiful. So these developments are designed with a really strict code which does fit in with the local star. Do you think that is a risk now? I think it is both a risk and it's incredibly important. One house, one bad house can really destroy a village. We're lucky. I live in a really beautiful village, but half the village has been built since the Second World War, but no one would really realise that because the local vernacular is being used. You've had the benefit of a family being deeply interested. My father was the same. And building houses that fit in. And I think it's really important. The risk is that you lower the standards, you rush in, you get lots of suburban type houses built in villages and they look terrible. So I've always felt that building in villages is absolutely fine, provided it is of a high enough architectural standard using the local vernacular so that the new houses are a benefit to the village as opposed to a detriment to the village. And also new houses bring new people into villages. They keep the village facilities going, they keep the village living. And I see that as very important. And certainly from my experience, and we've built a number of houses over the years, that's absolutely been the case. What are your hopes, your plans for the future of the estate? Well, one of the things I have always wanted to achieve is a long-term development plan. And when an estate talks about long term, we're talking about 50 plus years. Most people look at 10 years as being long term. In the terms of an estate, that's short to medium. So I'd like to have a long term plan as to how the village will develop with enough green space in the development and a style which will mean that the village becomes a prettier place as time goes on. I think that's really important. I do see a lot of the things about an estate is the survival game. The traditional historic house has a really important role to play. Many of our houses, historic houses have been knocked down. But for the last generation, they've done extremely well to survive. And in order for that to happen, you need to have a viable business to support it. And I see that as really, really important. And creating opportunity and how you develop any community and getting it right is really important. And Avril, what advice would you give landowners and estates like Hovingham who are embarking on any project which requires planning in terms of how they can ensure they deliver a good development and they get permission and can get it over the line? I think we've already mentioned the primary one earlier, which is engagement with the community. I think that's incredibly important. We know that planners also value that, so it's not just to do the right thing. It helps you get through the planning system. We know there's a real challenge with the planning system and it being under-resourced. So planning commissions can often take quite a lot of time. And in that time, reports and things, the amount of members that we get that say, "Well, I got all these reports, but they're now out of date and I've got to renew them because planning has taken so long." So actually getting the right team around you to keep a track of all of those things and make sure that you're being as efficient as possible while the planning system is not efficient. At the moment, we've got a real challenge with estates wanting to embark on things like housing development, but actually their time and financial resource is being diverted elsewhere. So we're seeing changes to energy performance certificates and the minimum energy efficiency standards. And a lot of our members that want to develop new housing have existing housing that they have to manage. And one of the difficulties there will be not planning enough for how much particularly capital-pipping existing properties is going to take. And perhaps having very ambitious targets to deliver new housing and sort of not looking at the estate as a whole. I think most of our estates absolutely do look at the wider estate plan, but there are some big changes coming that's going to cost our members a lot of money. So having, again, having the right team around you, having using a CLA member, I would always say, "Come to the CLA, ask for our advice." But also keeping an eye on what's going to happen with the private residential sector that already exists as well and how that might impact your plans to develop new housing. William Averill has just mentioned, alluded to some of the challenges, not just around development and building new properties on estates, but also how you ensure that existing possibly historic properties on the estate, which are rental properties, are meeting all those standards like EPC targets. Is that something which you've seen at Hovingham as a challenge? It's a huge challenge, a real challenge and a very, very expensive one. We see our role as a provider of rural rental property as really important. We like to give a really good service, we like to provide good quality properties to people. And almost all our residential property is in really good nick. We've been through most of it, refurbishing it to a high standard. And I have to say the cost of doing that is very high. I reckon the return on capital for our rural residential portfolio is about 0.7%, which is not a great investment. A lot of estates are selling their residential property and I think that is a worry going forwards. And the cost of bringing these properties, many of which are well over 100 years old, into the environmental standards hitting the EPCs that we need to achieve in the current market is really, really difficult. And I think the risk that we have, and this both affects rural and urban, is a significant reduction in rental property available, which will, of course, affect on the principle of supply and demand, affect rents and everything else. And I see the rural estate as playing a really important role in providing rental property for people in rural areas. So, William Worsley from Hovingham Estate in Yorkshire and the CLA's Senior Policy Advisor, Avril Roberts. Thank you both for joining us on Estate Matters. Thank you. Great, thank you.