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A shore thing

She survived the furore surrounding the future of London’s Olympic stadium and impressed Boris Johnson. Now, as tickets for the games go on sale, Baroness Margaret Ford is vowing to get taxpayers their money’s worth as she delivers the £7 billion Olympic legacy. Stuart Macdonald met her.

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The south of France has always attracted Baroness Margaret Ford. The chair of the Olympic Park Legacy Company has been coming here since her student days when she and a friend bought return tickets from her native Ayrshire to St Tropez - for £19.95. ‘I’ve still got the ticket even now,’ the 53-year-old says, reminiscing about the pair pitching their tent in a dry river bed, which subsequently flooded.

It’s fair to say that Baroness Ford’s planning skills have improved since then, shaping a career which has seen her name become synonymous with some of the UK’s most iconic regeneration schemes. From John (now Lord) Prescott’s millennium villages to her current role at the OPLC, the former chair of regeneration agency English Partnerships has not shied away from challenging projects.

Olympic vision

Baroness Ford is, therefore, no stranger to carrying the can for multi-million pound schemes. Yet her current project comes with a profile - and price tag - bigger than most. She is responsible for ensuring taxpayers get the best possible return on their £7 billion which has been sunk into preparing the Olympic Park in east London to host next summer’s games, which, as of this week, are just 500 days away.

It is a duty not lost on the Labour peer. ‘I’m not going to settle for second best on the Olympic Park, the taxpayer ought not to be asked to settle for second best, and the communities that live round the park ought not to be asked to settle for second best. We need to do a really good job,’ she says.

If she had any doubt just how much scrutiny doing that job would bring, it was dispelled by the media circus that followed her every move in the recent process to decide which of two football clubs should become tenant of the post-games stadium. Ever the politician, Baroness Ford describes the debate around the West Ham’s eventual triumph over Tottenham Hotspur as ‘noisy’ but ‘healthy’. She hopes the next stage will prove slightly less controversial.

That next stage is the launch of the first of five construction phases totalling 8,200 homes, which are to be built by the OPLC at the Olympic site, which will become the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park after the games.

It is this which brings Baroness Ford to Cannes and the annual Mipim property jamboree. She is concerned photographs of her against the backdrop of the beach and Mediterranean will attract negative publicity, sending out the wrong message to those taxpayers for whom she is trying to achieve value for money. She is at pains to point to various meetings with investors that she and her chief executive, Andy Altman, have been attending.

Property agents may be quaffing champagne in the bustling crowds surrounding us at the event’s London Pavilion, but Baroness Ford is far too shrewd to get caught letting her hair down on taxpayers’ time. She also ensures she liberally peppers our conversation with flattering references to her Conservative boss, London mayor Boris Johnson. She needn’t be overly concerned it seems. The previous afternoon Mr Johnson issued a ringing endorsement of the duo. ‘Our Olympic legacy planning is more advanced at this stage than in any other comparable Olympic city,’ he told Mipim visitors. ‘I want to pay tribute to the great work being done by the Olympic Park Legacy Company - Margaret Ford and Andy Altman.’

To remain in Mr Johnson’s good books, however, Baroness Ford must get to grips with two big jobs. First, she must strike a good deal with the developer tasked with building the games’ legacy homes. Second, she must ensure they can sell the thousands of resulting homes, each built to level 4 of the code for sustainable homes.

Beating the market

The latter will be no mean feat given the number of new properties which will flood the east London market after the games. Baroness Ford’s development will go head to head with Triathlon Homes, the consortium that will own and manage 1,379 affordable homes in the athletes’ village, plus whoever buys the village’s remaining 1,439 homes for market sale and development rights to a further 2,000 homes on the village land.

The baroness is adamant this tension is not really a consideration as the OPLC hopes at least 40 per cent of its homes will be family-sized, an element largely absent from the other schemes.

‘If we were going out with that product this summer we might be struggling,’ she says, referring to the weak housing market as she leans forward to be heard over the surrounding lunchtime hubbub. ‘But we’re not; we’re marketing the land now. So we think we are very lucky that the timing is so right.’

She is confident the trip to Cannes will help yield a development partner. ‘This year I detect a definite resurgence in residential,’ she says. ‘Whether it’s private rented - there’s a lot of interest in that model - or whether it is developer-led. The house builders are cautiously optimistic and I would share that.’

It is this optimism - allied to the fact that the government freed the OPLC of £600 million of debt attached to the Olympic park land when it was transferred from the London Development Agency in July last year - which allows Baroness Ford to claim confidence in her company retaining the freehold of the affordable homes to be built across five new ‘neighbourhoods’ in the park.

Ms Ford and Mr Altman did initially consider setting up the OPLC as a landlord to manage these homes; housing associations will be relieved to hear the Baroness now envisages doing a deal with an existing landlord to manage the stock on its behalf.

The hope is to have a developer lined up for this first phase, of up to 800 homes, later this year and according to Baroness Ford there is a ‘range of suitors’. It seems likely that some of the nine bidders for the 1,439 affordable homes on the athletes’ village will be in the running. These include developer and private landlord Grainger, where Baroness Ford is a non-executive director - one of several board roles she holds. With her OPLC hat on, she is reluctant to name other interested parties.

Welcome reform

The peer also toes the line on the coalition government’s changes to the planning and housing system, despite speaking fondly of them in relation to her time at English Partnerships (see box: Baroness Ford on…). ‘Our board takes the view that most of the [government’s] proposals are entirely benign. In the Localism Bill we will be transformed into a development corporation wholly owned by the mayor of London. For us, because that confers planning powers on us as well, it means that we have all of the tools to do the job. So we are good to go really.’

Where she does speak out and show a flash of the steel which prompts former English Partnerships colleagues to describe her as ‘formidable’ and ‘a shrewd operator’, is over the way housing associations finance affordable homes. ‘Whether there was a lot of money around or less money around now, the kind of work we are doing in the Olympic Park is to say “actually, the time is right now to get off the dependency culture of grant and to look at other more intelligent ways of doing this”,’ she says, punctuating her points with her hands.

‘We have hugely well-resourced housing associations, massive businesses with lots of assets which are able to raise money independently and have been raising money independently in the capital markets and banking markets for a long, long time.

‘I think we have to say, “OK, we have to be much more efficient with those kind of organisations that have had a lot of government grant for a number of years”. So we are where we are and we should all just knuckle down and get on with it.’

Knuckling down - no doubt a skill that comes in handy if you wake up to find yourself marooned in a tent in the south of France.

Baroness Ford on…

English Partnerships
‘I said when I left EP you’d have had to be a complete idiot not to have made a good job of it during that time because the property market was very benign and it was going in the right direction. We had a great portfolio, a lot of grant from government and the Housing Corporation during those years had record levels of grant, so a lot was accomplished.’

Homes and Communities Agency
‘The reason we went to the trouble of merging these two organisations [English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation] and set up that agency was precisely to say, “there have to be more sensible ways of procuring affordable housing than just stuffing more and more levels of grant into things”.’

That stadium decision
‘I was astonished at the amount of coverage that it got, but I suppose the thing to do is never to underestimate how interested people are in football…Everyone now says, “yeah, of course that is the right solution” - it feels very natural.’

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