#244 PropCast: Tom Sleigh - the City of London's planning optimist

Tom Sleigh, Chairman of the Planning and Transportation Committee for the City of London Corporation, is the youngest planning chair the City has ever had, and potentially the country. Working in one of the most important square miles to the UK economy, infrastructure must be at the heart of all decisions made.

The City has undergone a revival in recent years, driven largely by the macro and micro trends since the end of COVID. As Chair of the Planning and Transport Committee, Sleigh acknowledges he has got a lot of plates spinning to keep things running smoothly. On transportation, Sleigh believes the Corporation has a responsibility to provide high quality streets that ensure the smooth flow of people, whether that be on foot, bicycle or other forms of transport. It is the planning side that Sleigh says gets him asked far more questions, but this is the element he views as fairly straightforward. He was to continue to offer a predictable, stable, plan-led planning system that investors, developers and everyone else in the chain wanted to come into business with. Sleigh acknowledges that this is different from the perception sometimes given off, with many people seeing it as adversarial and that often people believe Planning Committees view all change as bad.

Sleigh went further to explain how various organisations get a far heavier weighting than others when it comes to planning. These come in many forms, such as statutory bodies, heritage bodies and environmental bodies, although the latter less so in London. This is before you get to the many letters of objection from those ‘who are fully signed up to what seems to be a national pastime of objecting to planning applications.’ The City, Sleigh argues, is different and an outlier. He feels things would be better if people were more like this, with last year acting as their best year for applications in the front door in the last decade – and that’s when they started counting! Last year Sleigh’s Committee approved half a million square metres of new grade A office space, with a 96% approval rate overall. Sleigh says this is how planning should be: not adversarial. But, he notes, it has become more so, and is probably at its worst in the last five to ten years.

The secret to this proactive engagement is a very clear policy document, titled City Plan 2040. It is a few months away from adoption and enforcement, but it already carries a huge amount of weight in Committee decisions. It is extensive, covering h