The Planning Life Insights of Bryan - part 3

Having your Victoria Sponge and eating it: structuring major schemes during planning as marketable assets 

Click here to listen to “The Planning Life Insights of Bryan", a BCLP podcast looking into the practical things you need to know to navigate the UK Planning system.

You’re presented with a gorgeous-looking Victoria Sponge Cake, but told you’d have to eat the whole thing. Because it wasn’t possible to cut out a single slice. Even if you could, there’d be a chance you’d end up with half the cake’s calories. And you’re not even that hungry.

Sound bizarre?

Well, that’s basically what happens with the permissions and planning agreements for some pretty significant schemes.

BCLP is involved throughout the whole lifecycle of major mixed-use developments: from site acquisition and forward funding to achieving planning, the construction phase and letting up or selling the sites on (in one piece or in parcels). And during financing and refinancing.

We’re seeing that more and more schemes have not been structured to make it straightforward for key parties down the line to accept the risks and liabilities baked into a scheme during the highs and lows of its planning stage.

Joined by Rachele Pacifici of Cast Consultancy and Verity Waington of BCLP Real Estate, Sheridan Treger, Mike Dempsey and Jemma Green of BCLP Planning explore:

• understanding the longer term transactional life of a mixed-use scheme
• structuring planning conditions, s106 obligations and CIL with an eye on that
• how investors, operators, forward funders, buyers and lenders see planning outcomes
• what developers can do upfront during planning so agents don’t have to struggle to shift unmarketable floorspace, financing is easier and you don’t need mammoth parent company guarantees to get deals over the line
• why this doesn’t happen enough
• getting local authorities on board with the imperative to structure schemes in a deliverable way
• legal alchemy at the transactional stage which can still make deals happen and allow mixed-use schemes to be constructed and operated across split ownerships
• not over-cooking the Victoria Sponge analogy

This podcast was contributed to by BCLP Trainee Solicitor Jemma Green.