Greater Brighton Explained

 

Here at Very Own Studio our portfolio of built environment clients has been steadily growing over the last few years, so Mark and I were pleased to be invited by Brighton Chamber to their latest Construction Voice event, not only to learn more about what’s happening in our city, but also what’s coming up that will affect our local clients and colleagues in the construction community.

 

It was great to see such a mix of people attending, from local architects to Brighton University planning students.

 

So. Greater Brighton: what does it mean? Following an introduction from a broken ankled event sponsor Ed Westlake of Bouygues Development, (get well soon Ed), our chair for the evening Miranda Birch asked the audience how many knew the answer to that question… a few hands tentatively went up. I admit my hand stayed down, so this promised to be a steep learning curve for us all!

 

First up, Nick Hibberd, Head of City Regeneration at Brighton & Hove City Council, took us through the history and present form as Greater Brighton Economic Board (GBEB) and it’s Greater Brighton Investment Programme (GBIP). Greater Brighton covers the city of Brighton & Hove and the districts and boroughs of Lewes, Adur, Worthing and Mid Sussex. GBEB is made up of five local authorities, three business partnerships, two universities, four further education colleges, the Coast to Capital Local Enterprise Partnership and the South Downs National Park Authority. It’s stated aim is to ‘protect and grow the economy by coordinating economic development activities and investments at city region level.’ GBEB see the potential to create the strongest economy south of London – a southern powerhouse if you like. To be honest, it’s a tough one to sum up in a nutshell, but you can read a lot more in their latest annual report here.

 

The over-arching theme running through Nick’s presentation was the sum of our parts is greater than the whole and, for this to be successful, community engagement is essential. The fact that GBEB is not dominated by local authorities seems crucial to emphasise here.

 

Nick also took us through some of the construction and infrastructure projects underway and in the pipeline through the GBIP and our next speaker, Max Woodford, Head of Regeneration and Investment at Lewes District Council, gave us more information on projects in the Lewes region. Max also spoke in some detail about the benefit to his region, and one can suppose the other outlying regions, of the benefits of becoming part of the ‘Brighton brand’ and rebalancing the city region economy. 

 

As Andrew Swayne, Group Risk Manager & Head of Internal Audit, Ricardo, Chair of Adur and Worthing Business Partnership and Greater Brighton Economic Board member and our last speaker of the evening neatly put it, GBEB gives us a voice at the table of government which we wouldn’t otherwise have. Andrew also took us through projects in the pipeline of the Worthing region and emphasised that overall housing (and infrastructure to enable future housing) came through as the most prominent construction investment.

 

Miranda finished the evening with an audience Q&A, with questions ranging from the recently allocated UNESCO Biosphere designation coinciding with the GB boundary, Brighton School of Planning’s SUMP (no I didn’t know that either), but mostly concerns raised about how GBEB will make decisions by consensus, especially with politically opposed local authorities on the board. Will the recent Localism Act require them to support a duty to agree, rather than disagree? Only 18 months into the formation of GBEB, lots of activity and a lot of long term projects in the pipeline, there is still clearly a very long way to go and it will be an interesting, hopefully positive journey for all of us.

 

And a final thought, I have to admit it was a struggle to write the detail of the project pipeline on the evening, so I thought I’d include a link to where you can find it online… but there doesn’t appear to be a Greater Brighton website. As a Brighton citizen, I would personally find this a very useful resource and as a professional working with a talented web design and development team, (ahem, shameless plug: veryownstudio.com), I’d like to suggest this as an obvious next step for the Board in engaging their community.