Show Notes
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 how high you can build in the east of the City, through to material reuse and elements on quality design. If compliance is achieved here then the application will move onto stage two, where applicants will engage with case officers and the wider team, whether that be a heritage expert or someone with an engineering background to ensure it can become committee ready. Fundamentally, it is ensuring an application is policy compliant and then ensuring that planning officers have helped work it up to a high standard. Sleigh is proud to say that a lot of people they engage with say the City’s planning officers set a very high bar.
When asked about the lack of resources that planning departments face nationally, something that has steadily increased over the last twenty years, Sleigh acknowledges the problem. Planning teams have seen budgets cuts and headcount reductions, like many government organisations, and Sleigh feels that is reflected in the outcomes. The City is different, with a fantastically qualified and larger team, which matters a lot. The projects they work on can be the difference between a major bank coming to the City or not, with a big push to get HQs back into the City post-pandemic. This all matters, inspiring confidence and stability which will drive more international businesses to join them. In an area steeped in as much history as the City, construction can often unearth the unexpected, such as recently at 85 Grace Church Street which uncovered an element of
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Abri may be one of the UK’s most significant large-scale housing organisations you have never heard of. It owns and manages almost 60,000 homes, stretching from Somerset and Bristol through a Hampshire heartland to Bracknell, Berkshire and, through Octavia, west London. As Andrew Teacher observes on this week’s PropCast, that scale would make it comparable in size with a FTSE 100 company, were it listed. For context, Grainger, the UK’s largest listed residential landlord, owns just over 11,200 rental homes; Abri owns more than five times as many. Even adding Unite Group’s 64,000 student beds to Grainger’s total (and beds, admittedly, are not quite homes), the two listed names together reach around 75,000 roughly the scale of the group Abri now hopes to create through its proposed merger with Curo Group, which would bring the combined organisation to more than 73,000 homes and community assets serving around 142,000 customers across the south and south west of England. Like the G15 giants, Abri has built scale deliberately, through the merger of Radian and Yarlington in 2019, Silva Homes in 2023 and Octavia in 2024, and built capability alongside it: customer satisfaction at the top end of the sector, an A3 stable rating from Moody’s and the Regulator of Social Housing’s G1 and V1 grades, confirmed in November 2025. G1 is the highest governance grade, the regulator’s assurance that the organisation is effectively run and manages its risks. V1, the highest viability grade, confirms “the financial capacity to deal with a wide range of adverse scenarios”, and has become rare among large associations. Gary Orr, chief executive of Abri Group and its predecessor organisation Yarlington since 2011, has done a remarkable job steering the organisation through significant change and significant expansion, never an easy thing, particularly in the housing association world. The result is a balance sheet that equips Abri both to manage the daily complexity of providing homes and services for well over 100,000 people, a figure approaching 150,000 through the proposed Curo merger, and to pursue an ambitious growth strategy supported in part by institutional capital. “We’re ambitious about being a trusted partner in delivery and piloting some of these ideas,” says Theo Plowman, Abri’s head of policy and campaigns. “We’re in the room on several different conversations, we’re really well placed and we have the expertise to do it.” Plowman joined a year ago from the British Property Federation, where he led much of the trade body’s residential policy work, particularly on supporting institutional investment into build-to-rent. The conversation that follows ranges across pension capital, shared ownership reform and why the sector needs to stop underselling itself. Scale as strategy Growth is deliberate. In April 2026 Abri published an investment strategy targeting 20,000 new homes by 2036, “doubling our output” as Plowman puts it, alongside around £450m of investment in existing homes and an ambition to become a top five provider by scale, customer satisfaction and as a place to work. Delivery runs through its Strategic Partnership with Homes England, which awarded Abri £300m under the 2021-26 Affordable Homes Programme as part of a £2.66bn investment in new homes, joint ventures such as the 50:50 acquisition of the former Ford Airfield in West Sussex, where 1,500 homes are planned, and ambitious regeneration schemes like The Granges in Windsor, where four tower blocks containing 192 properties are being replaced with 413 sustainable homes. The next step came on 1 July 2026, when the boards of Abri and Curo announced they are exploring a new partnership that would create a group owning and managing more than 73,000 homes and community assets, serving 142,000 customers across the south and south west of England, with combined turnover of £598m in 2024/25. Curo, formed in 1999 through a stock transfer from Bath and North East Somerset Council, owns