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No sooner does Michael Gove issue a warning against treating environmental issues as a “religious crusade” than aircraft have to be dispatched to rescue British holidaymakers from somewhat biblical scenes in the eastern Mediterranean.
Gove’s comments were part of the hand-wringing following the local election result in Uxbridge, despite the fact that it owed more to specific local concerns about the ultra-low emissions zone than climate unease generally. Gove observed that “inflexible application of tight . . . rules” around net zero policies or energy transition could prompt a public backlash.
What is perhaps worse is the arbitrary imposition of non-rules, signalling a change in climate-related thinking despite an absence of actual policy. But that is what the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, one Gove, seemed to do last week in blocking a proposal from Marks and Spencer to redevelop its store near Marble Arch.
The retailer wanted to demolish Orchard House, a 1930s art deco-fronted building that when cobbled together with two adjacent sites comprises M&S’s flagship location and a thoroughly dismal retail experience. It planned a nine-storey mixed-use development with retail, leisure and offices — which it was widely agreed would benefit the end of Oxford Street largely populated by department store-turned-tourist attraction Selfridges and a load of tatty sweet shops.
The case became totemic for those campaigning for a “retrofit first” approach in construction, prioritising the repurposing of existing buildings rather than the raze and rebuild approach that involves more “embodied carbon” in the fabric of the building. In fairness, opinion on this topic has changed utterly in the years since M&S started work on the scheme.
Still the retailer, which has used retrofit successfully at other stores, said it considered 16 alternatives to demolition, none of which were viable; it said the new building would be among London’s most sustainable and would pay back the emissions involved in its construction in 11 years.
Campaigners, led by SAVE Britain’s Heritage, disputed that calculation and said that M&S had not considered a proper deep retrofit, only light-touch renovation. After a bad-tempered inquiry last year, Gove overturned an experienced planning inspector to block the scheme. M&S reacted furiously dubbing the decision “pathetic” and “anti-business”.
There is a definite sense that M&S with its high-profile site has been used to symbolise a shift in government policy that has not happened yet, holding the retailer to a standard that has still to be written. It points out 17 other approved demolitions in Westminster, with four on Oxford Street alone. Campaigners and industry alike have called for years for clearer rules on embodied carbon. National planning guidance has only a fleeting mention of reusing existing resources. Westminster plans a retrofit first policy but it has not yet been drafted.
Perhaps as a result, the secretary of state’s decision rested heavily on heritage concerns (that the new building would detract from Selfridges, which supported the development), despite the fact that Orchard House was rejected for listing. He said the case should not set a precedent on carbon but everyone thinks it does. There was discussion of the idea that the issue of embodied carbon would become less problematic as the UK electricity grid decarbonises, which sounds like an argument for paralysis in the meantime, from a government backsliding on climate commitments.
As politicians prepare to skip away from difficult choices that affect voters, businesses and investors are navigating more uncertainty and unpredictability in a vacuum of green policymaking. All sides of this particular debate agree that what is needed is an agreed methodology on calculating lifecycle carbon emissions and clear, national guidance on what is acceptable, including how this interacts with considerations of growth, employment or community. The British Property Federation found 80 per cent of its members wanted new regulation.
The M&S result is one that could hamper the development of exactly the type of urban, brownfield sites that the government said this week should be built on. The assumptions and requirements for what is possible there just went up in smoke.
