The West Midlands Branch of the Royal Institution of British Architects (RIBA) held a discussion on reuse versus new buildings on Friday 23 October at Coventry University. The three principal speakers were Catherine Croft (Director of the Twentieth Century Society), Leanne Tritton (co-founder of Don’t Waste Buildings) and Jim O’Boyle (Former Senior Coventry City Councillor 2016-2026).
The starting point for all three of the speakers was the challenges that we face on, for example, climate change and the housing emergency. There was, thus, a consensus on some of the benefits of reuse including:
- Tackling the issue of embodied carbon when existing properties are demolished – this accounts for 20% of the built environment’s total UK carbon emissions
- Number of homes that could be created from reusing heritage buildings – the House of Commons Committee on Culture, Media and Sport has calculated that this amounts to 670,000 homes
- Reuse is quicker than new build – on average it takes about nine months to repurpose a building for housing, but the figure is six years for developing and building out a new housing estate.
So, why don’t we make more use of existing buildings?
Various suggestions were made but the crucial one is that VAT at 20% is generally charged on refurbishing a property compared with a zero rate for new building. This can transform a proposal to reuse a large building for housing from being a viable proposition to the situation where it is better in financial terms to demolish and build new. Evidence from France shows that if VAT is significantly reduced to 5%, the economics of reuse is positively transformed.
Other factors include:
- Lack of available skills in the built environment professions to progress reuse schemes
- Lack of innovation and entrepreneurship in seeing the potential of reusing existing buildings
- Attitudes of developers and institutional investors (such as pension funds) who are either risk-adverse or charge a high premium on reuse compared to new build
- Treasury methods for assessing the viability of projects which underpin government grant funding decisions and favour new build.
The session concluded with a question-and-answer session between the audience and the three discussants that focussed on Coventry and the West Midlands:
- Devolving greater powers to elected mayors, such as Richard Parker who is Mayor of the West Midlands was suggested – but the three main speakers were sceptical of this without other changes, for example, to the VAT regime
- Jim O’Boyle highlighted that council ownership of land has been more important than planning controls in encouraging reuse of some buildings in Coventry – he cited the example of the reuse of the former Cooperative Department Store on Corporation Street for apartments.
The issue of the former Swimming Baths and the Elephant became a central part of the discussion and why the Council had obtained listed building consent to demolish the former. Jim O’Boyle argued that the cost of the upkeep of the buildings (£0.5 million per year) made it imperative that a decision to demolish had to be taken. More importantly, he highlighted that despite a rigorous attempt to attract developers, there was no interest in reusing the buildings. However, some of the audience disagreed with these comments. Nevertheless, there was a consensus among the three speakers that the problem stemmed from a Council decision over 10 years ago to build a new swimming pool at the Alan Higgs Centre on Allard Way. No thought was given by the Council at that time to the implications including the future use of the grade 2 swimming baths.
Useful websites:
Don’t Waste Buildings – Don’t Waste Buildings
The Twentieth Century Society – The Twentieth Century Society – Campaigning for outstanding buildings