Keynote 1 | Health, Life Sciences & the New Growth Plan for London

Speakers: Paul Kirkbright, Head of Knowledge Exchange and Partnerships, South London Partnership & BIG South London | Mayor Jason Perry, Conservative Mayor of Croydon | Howard Dawber, Deputy Mayor of Business and Growth

Paul Kirkbright, Head of Knowledge Exchange and Partnerships, South London Partnership & BIG South London
So I’m absolutely delighted to welcome Mayor Jason Perry to introduce Deputy Mayor Howard Dawber to talk about the new Growth Plan for London and the positioning of Life Sciences and Health Innovation within it.

 

Mayor Jason Perry, Conservative Mayor of Croydon
Thank you very much indeed Paul. Howard is about to appear on our screens and is going to be talking about the London Growth Plan. He and I have been on a bit of a London tour over the last few months, for the London Growth Plan. But we have very much been working on this GLA London Councils and working together as one of my other hats is the Lead for Business for London Councils. And Howard is now going to talk us through where we’ve got to with the London Growth Plan, how that impacts on the region and what the next steps are for that. So I hand over to you. Howard.

 

Howard Dawber, Deputy Mayor of Business and Growth
Thank you very much. I’m very sorry not to be with you in person today. I’m afraid I have COVID, which sounds quaint and a bit retro these days, but it’s still out there, and I thought, on balance, you’d rather have me present virtually than present and potentially dangerous. I don’t regret many things in life, but when kissing that bat, I probably should have thought better of it.

This is the third event I’ve done in this part of London in the last seven days. I did a tour of Croydon Town Centre last week with Mayor Perry and a virtual speech yesterday. It shows a lot is happening in Croydon and the surrounding boroughs across South London and that many opportunities exist.

I often say, if you took this part of London, these five boroughs in the South London Partnership, you took their economy, aspects like Croydon, like the universities, like the town centres, like Wimbledon, and put them in pretty much any other county in the country, they would be seen as a massive opportunity, one of the largest urban economies in the UK. But because they’re in London, they don’t get treated with the same national importance and national reach that this part of the city has.

So, what are we doing? We are working together with London councils, with London boroughs, with a wide range of partners, including, obviously, the private sector, inward investors, the London Anchor Institutions, the university sector, the FE sector, the stakeholders in the third sector and our trade unions to develop a growth plan for London. I want to thank Jason Perry – Mayor of Croydon, for his role in the consultation and engagement over the last few months and for bringing the plan together.

Our primary role in the Growth Plan for London is to help create 150,000 good jobs for Londoners to achieve inclusive economic growth and improve London’s productivity. The idea is to help the capital reach its full economic potential, making sure that all of London’s citizens and communities have access to the benefits of economic prosperity and that London expands its role as a gateway to the rest of the country and its significant £43.6 billion net contribution to the national economy.

The plan covers frontier innovation and high-growth sectors, the start of a new inclusive talent strategy for the city, focus on local economies, including high streets, town centres and small businesses, and the infrastructure we need, including housing, transport, power and broadband for delivery and growth. And sustainably deliver all this while meeting your net zero commitments.

We know London has a galaxy of clusters; it’s not one cluster around the central activity zone. It’s a galaxy of clusters, particularly in fast-growing sectors, and we are thriving. London is growing.

In health and life sciences, South London has a significant contribution to make. Right now, as we know, this sub-region has many universities and further education institutions with a strong commitment to delivering excellence, contributing to local outcomes, and working in collaboration. I visited the London Cancer Hub in Sutton in the summer, which will be Europe’s largest oncology-focused Life Science district when it’s finished. The potential there is enormous.

St Mary’s in Twickenham is doing pioneering work in digital technology to tackle current and future health challenges. The newly formed City St George’s, University of London is already one of the largest suppliers of the health workforce in the whole of the UK, let alone the capital. It will be a health powerhouse for students and researchers in the NHS, alongside the London South Bank University campus in Croydon.

The region is bringing together the public and private sectors, the NHS, and academics to boost innovation and collaboration, including the circular economy, decarbonisation, and health and wellbeing.

Health and life sciences are among the most significant opportunity areas for London. You would be forgiven for thinking, given the amount of attention that’s been on, for example, the knowledge quarter just recently on White Chapel in East London, on SC1, around Lambeth and Southwark and around the Imperial College and the West London tech and innovation corridor that a lot of this is going to be in the CAZ or north of the river. But we will only be the life science leaders we want to be if all of London is part of that cluster. As I said, London is a galaxy of clusters, which means that this region, this subregion in South London, has a vital role.

We are already working hard through the Mayor’s jobs and skills programmes and the boroughs to help local people get the skills they need to access good jobs in this sector. Through skills academies and bootcamps, we focus on areas like health and life sciences and digital skills. We’re working through Med City, our promotion agency for the health and life science section of London, and it’s now part of London and Partners to promote South London as a life science destination for people and investment.

For example, we are promoting the Innovation Gateway at the London Cancer Hub, and recently, we published our Life Sciences Proposition for London to boost development and research collaboration. We’re working on inward and outward trade missions to places like the Far East to Dubai to Houston to Boston to New York to engage with organisations that we may be able to secure both investment and activity in London.

And we’ve got some good reason for optimism here. We knew we were probably not punching our weight in life sciences. On some of the international lists of comparatives, we’ve been in the 20s regarding where we rank globally. And that’s partly because, historically, we haven’t built enough lab space to accommodate the businesses that have come out of universities.

Oxford and Cambridge have done well, so Oxford and Cambridge have grown over the last few years, but we’ve failed to grab and keep the IP coming out of our 54 university institutions in London. We identified that as an issue a couple of years ago, and I’m pleased to say we can now report 6 million square feet of lab space under construction within London, which will accommodate many new, small and growing businesses.

And we can get a lot further than that with our data in London, which is probably if we can get it all in one place, the best health data in the world thanks to the NHS. And all those forms that we’ve all filled out over the last well, some of us for 50 years plus looking in the room, many of you much, much earlier in that, but you will have filled out a lot of paperwork over your life already, that’s all gone into the most extraordinary data set that we have, going back decades, covering an astonishingly diverse population with multiple health needs. There is nothing like that on the planet.

One of the reasons why London is very attractive for people to do drug trials is because you can get statistically valuable data for different types of people. Now that data, coupled with the 1,300 AI businesses that are either started or scaling up in London at the moment, as well as the push that we’re going to give to that sector economy, puts us in a position to be, we think, probably the number one health and life sciences location in Europe as a city, and somewhere around number three in the world.

So, this is something where we are growing very, very rapidly. And I’m not incorporating Oxford and Cambridge into that. But they’re not far away. They’re part of that golden triangle, including London, which could be, and should be, probably the number one place on the planet for health and life sciences.

Now, what does this mean for South London? The first thing is that the existing universities, businesses, hospitals, and the Cancer Hub in Sutton, South London already has a significant stake in this future growth. However, alongside the very high-end, globally mobile, multiple-degree people in the lifestyle sector, about 45% of the jobs in the industry are non-degree level roles. And that provides a direct opportunity for people without going to university to come into the sector with diverse skills. The growing businesses will need all the usual things that businesses require, from HR to facilities management to IT, and for every life science job we create, two and a half additional jobs are formed in the broader economy through the supply chain. So, it’s a robust sector for growing jobs across the economy.

What we’re doing with the programmes that we already have and the programmes that will come out of the London Growth Plan are intended to help lay down the foundations for that economy to grow long-term. The partnerships and the networks that formed events like today can only strengthen our shared ambitions to deliver on this. What’s happening around the London Growth Plan is we have a document called Towards Growth Plan, which is published on the GLA website which sets out the areas we tend to focus on. We’re still consulting and listening to people, and we will do so throughout, not least in the next part of what we do over the next couple of months before the Plan is published, probably towards the end of February.

We want to hear from people about what we should do and what interventions should help businesses and people from all backgrounds and sizes benefit from growth. We’ve talked about life sciences as one of our high-growth sectors. The other high-growth sectors we’ve identified are in the creative industries and the experience economy, which includes events, sports, and immersive activities, which we’re particularly good at in London. I don’t want to get into football, but London, with seven Premier League clubs, is unique. No other city in the world has seven professional clubs in the national sport playing inside its boundaries. When you add that to the film, TV, game, and growing events and hospitality sector, London is strong and poised for future growth.

Regarding climate, we are a leading global hub for climate tech and green tech. 23% of our investment last year was in that sector. And so, we’ve got a lot of things growing very quickly.

We also want to pay attention to the things that we’ve always been good at, so financial and business services, legal, and insurance. We’re the legal and insurance capital of the world. New York has a different view, but we are there or thereabouts, the number one financial services centre, and that underpins all the other sectors in which we want to grow.

We’re now working on specific interventions. What will we do to grow these sectors? At the heart of that is our inclusive talent strategy, which we’re starting to work on the framework of now, which is about changing our whole skill system to work more like an HR Department for London so that we can identify the skills that businesses need, both now and in the future, and then train up and identify the people that go for those skills needs.

So that’s enough from me. Buckle up and watch this space. A lot is happening. This is all in the context of the government identifying growth as its number one priority, producing its national industrial strategy, which we’ve contributed towards. But we aren’t going to do this ourselves. This isn’t a plan for the Mayor and the Mayor’s office; this is a plan for London. So we want everyone to come together from all our stakeholders, from all the sectors I mentioned before, particularly local authorities and local stakeholders from South London, to make sure we not only help London regain its position as the number one business capital in the world and to lead the world in life sciences, but that it works for people here in Kingston, Richmond, Sutton, Merton and Croydon as well, and that everybody gets the best possible chance to take part in what I think is going to be an exciting 5-10 years coming up.

Thank you.