Event Recap: How do you create public-private partnerships that deliver transformational projects?

Buro Happold invited B&NES Council and TCN to share their journey and their thoughts on how a strong public-private partnership can unlock and regenerate complex inner-city brownfield sites.

The Newark Works sat derelict for years, with the site’s constraints making development unviable and unappealing. The development was featured in the government’s Levelling Up Prospectus as an example of the successful allocation and use of public funds.

Buro Happold has extensive experience in complex building refurbishment and urban regeneration projects. As we continue to respond to the climate crisis, projects like Bath Quays will become more commonplace. In this discussion, we explore how B&NES Council and TCN collaborated to realise the site’s potential.

Our panellists

• Simon Martin, Director of Regeneration & Housing, B&NES Council
• Richard Pearce, Founder & Director, TCN

Moderated by: Claire Smith, Buro Happold

What did we learn?

• Understanding the specific strengths of each party enabled people to focus on their role in bringing these opportunities to market. This created a unique, dynamic, flexible offer.
  • Key to this was understanding each partner’s appetite for risk, ensuring a level of commitment that enables complex sites to move forward.
  • B&NES invested internally in the commercial return of the Bath Quays project, balancing that risk by bringing on board TCN, a partner with extensive experience of refurbishing historic buildings.

• Finding a partner with common goals is critical to a long-term project. TCN’s operating model and ESG commitments convinced B&NES that they were the correct legacy partner for the city and people of Bath.

• There are ways to de-risk complex brownfield sites. In this case, a solid understanding of the fundamental infrastructure requirements, and a strong relationship with the Environmental Agency, were key to unlocking the site.

• Public finance can be leveraged into an attractive commercial opportunity for private companies. There are challenges relating to ensuring that schemes are compliant with state aid legislation, but they can be overcome when partners share and bear the risk.