The Kid Frankie
New member
- Sep 5, 2012
- 2,082
This should sell out and some. Reckon there will be a fair few in the home end.
Got something to say or just want fewer pesky ads? Join us... 😊
Brentford Away
- Thread starter BHAFC_Pandapops
- Start date
Miximate
Well-known member
Me and jnr making the trip, first away day this season. Family and friends train ticket only £16.50 from Burgess hill, excellent value!
Gazwag
5 millionth post poster
My tickets arrived today, that was quick
Fran Hagarty
Well-known member
I'm going. I have no interest in cycling!
bassking
Member
5 of us going, and tickets just come this morning, breakfast in Brighton early, straight up on train and in the pubs early.
The Birdman
New member
All seats gone I think we will sell every ticket for all London games including Millwall
Standing only
Standing only
Billy the Fish
Technocrat
Has anyone bought tickets recently? Can't select anything now.
Ticket now gone
thony
Active member
I just tried buying one - although it doesn't say "Sold Out", when I try to proceed with my 1 ticket I just get a "No Vacancies" message.
GolfingGull
Active member
Any idea if any more will be released?
The Kid Frankie
New member
- Sep 5, 2012
- 2,082
If any more released it won't be many. Home end party 
chimneys
Well-known member
- Jun 11, 2007
- 3,609
Football stadium kicks off new era of social conscience
22 August 2014 | By Adam Branson
Brentford FC Aerial view Lawyers use Social Value Act to secure planning permission for Brentford FC. Adam Branson reports.
Brentford FC’s plans to leave its current home at Griffin Park and move to a proposed new facility on a 4.7-hectare site down the road are nothing if not ambitious. As well as a new stadium capable of hosting 20,000 fans, the plans also involve 910 homes in 12 tower blocks and a 160-room hotel.
The scale of the project meant that, in addition to gaining planning permission from Hounslow Council, the plans also required the approval of the mayor of London, who gave it the nod in February. Following an objection from English Heritage, the project was also referred to central government, and consequently was given the go-ahead only in March.
A lengthy process though it was, it is not unusual for a big mixed-use scheme. What is different, however, is the way Brentford FC’s planning lawyers approached the application, using recent legislation never previously applied in a planning context.
Now that the period of judicial review has come to an end, they are finally able to talk about the battle and its implications for other developments up and down the country.
The Social Value Act was put onto the statute books last year and while it has gained little publicity, it is a big deal — for the third sector in particular. For the first time, the act placed a duty on public bodies to consider social value when procuring goods and services.
Specifically, the act states that an authority must consider “how what is proposed to be procured might improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of the relevant area” and “how, in conducting the process of procurement, it might act with a view to securing that improvement”.
The implications of the act were obvious for charities and other third sector bodies that depend on public sector grants to carry out their work: in short, in order to be eligible for funding, they would have to provide solid evidence of the social benefits of their activities.
“The third sector certainly knows a lot about the act because now when they’re pitching to local authorities or government institutions those authorities will expect you to be able to explain the social value that will be generated by the work you do with them,” says Alistair Watson, head of planning and environment at law firm Taylor Wessing, which represents Brentford FC. “It’s a way of putting some numbers behind a funding bid.”
When taking on Brentford FC as a client, Watson saw an opportunity to use the Social Value Act to help make the case to Hounslow Council for planning permission. The club has a long and celebrated history of working closely with its surrounding community. In its 27-year history, its community trust has won the Football League Community Club of the Year award five times and it currently works with more than 27,000 local people each year across 178 projects concerning sports participation, health, education and social inclusion.
“We’ve always been at the heart of our community,” says Chris Gammon, the director of Brentford FC’s development subsidiary Lionel Road Developments. “Our community trust has outgrown the space we have in the current stadium and has had to move out. The new stadium would give the trust a purpose-built space and new facilities including a climbing wall and dedicated classrooms.”
If Brentford FC’s community activities would not only be protected but also enhanced by a new stadium, Watson reasoned, surely there was a case to be made under the Social Value Act for the scheme to be allowed to go ahead. On this basis, the club and Taylor Wessing engaged the services of consultancy Substance, which specialises in work concerning the social value of sport.
Substance has developed a tool it calls Sport Works, which it uses to put an objective financial value on sporting outreach programmes. “Increasingly, we were finding that people thought that anecdotal stories were nice, but maybe there were other stories that demonstrated something else,” says Tim Crabbe, chair and director of strategy at Substance. “They were looking for something to quantify the benefits in monetary terms.”
While it is easy to be sceptical about putting a financial value on something as intangible as social value, it has to be said that Sport Works has been subject to rigorous peer review — and was considered sufficiently robust to be taken seriously by Hounslow Council, the Greater London Authority and the Department for Communities and Local Government.
It also seems to be based on some widely accepted social science. Crabbe makes an analogy with the insurance industry. “When you ring up for an insurance quote, that quote is based on how old you are, what gender you are, where you live and so on,” he says. “They build a risk profile. We’re able to do that for the people the club has worked with.”
The model works by examining the costs involved in, for instance, young people from particular social backgrounds getting involved in crime, inputting the reduced likelihood of that happening after participation on one of Brentford FC’s programmes and thereby calculating the saving to society. “If we can see that certain activities reduce the likelihood of somebody getting involved in the criminal justice system, we can put a price tag on that,” says Crabbe. Similar calculations can be made for other age groups and in areas such as health and employment.
Ultimately, the value of Brentford FC’s work in the community was calculated to be £8m a year historically and £11m a year if its stadium plans were allowed to proceed, something that Taylor Wessing’s Watson sought to use as a bargaining chip in the planning process.
A commitment to community activities played a critical role in section 106 planning gain negotiations on the project, with the club committing to run activities for the lifetime of the new stadium. If Brentford FC were to inhabit the stadium for as long as it has been at Griffin Park, that would mean a social value contribution well in excess of £1bn.
“We put it into the section 106 agreement and what the club and its trust have done is covenanted to run the wide range of programmes in Hounslow, and also in Richmond and Ealing,” says Watson. “Those can be added to over the years, but the concept of social value in a planning sense is a first: it’s the first time that measuring the value of social benefits has been used in a planning context.”
In the end, the Brentford FC section 106 agreement also included no commitment to contribute to affordable housing in Hounslow. However, Watson plays down any connection between the promised £11m a year in social value and the lack of an affordable housing contribution. Whether or not the case for the club’s social benefits had been made, he says, it simply wasn’t financially viable for the scheme to include an element of affordable housing.
“The initial phases of homes couldn’t at current prices and assumptions include affordable housing,” he says. “But there is an uplift provision in the section 106 agreement that allows the council in future years to say ‘hold on, land values have now shifted and you can now pay for affordable housing’. If there’s a viability review in two years’ time and it shows that it is possible, that’s when the council will get a lump sum for affordable housing.”
This, Watson says, is a good model for any planning authority worried that the Social Value Act will be used by developers to argue against the inclusion of affordable housing in their plans.
So the deal is done, but what next for the use of the Social Value Act? According to Watson, Taylor Wessing’s work with Brentford FC has already led to further opportunities. The firm is acting on behalf of a further four sporting institutions - two football clubs and two rugby clubs - with one of the organisations examining how housing a free school within its redevelopment plans could improve its planning benefits package.
However, Watson doesn’t believe that the use of the Social Value Act will be restricted to schemes involving sporting institutions. While he doubts a straight office development could make use of the act, he sees no reason why it shouldn’t be used to make the case for housing projects or mixed-use schemes.
Of course, developers have long played the numbers game in making their case for planning permission, with promises of high numbers of jobs to be created or the contribution of vast new areas of public parks. It’s also not uncommon for developers to claim that their plans will bring untold social benefits.
But what the Social Value Act — and Taylor Wessing’s work at Brentford FC — means is that for the first time developers can put some solid numbers behind their claims and expect that they will be taken seriously as a material consideration by planners.
22 August 2014 | By Adam Branson
Brentford FC Aerial view Lawyers use Social Value Act to secure planning permission for Brentford FC. Adam Branson reports.
Brentford FC’s plans to leave its current home at Griffin Park and move to a proposed new facility on a 4.7-hectare site down the road are nothing if not ambitious. As well as a new stadium capable of hosting 20,000 fans, the plans also involve 910 homes in 12 tower blocks and a 160-room hotel.
The scale of the project meant that, in addition to gaining planning permission from Hounslow Council, the plans also required the approval of the mayor of London, who gave it the nod in February. Following an objection from English Heritage, the project was also referred to central government, and consequently was given the go-ahead only in March.
A lengthy process though it was, it is not unusual for a big mixed-use scheme. What is different, however, is the way Brentford FC’s planning lawyers approached the application, using recent legislation never previously applied in a planning context.
Now that the period of judicial review has come to an end, they are finally able to talk about the battle and its implications for other developments up and down the country.
The Social Value Act was put onto the statute books last year and while it has gained little publicity, it is a big deal — for the third sector in particular. For the first time, the act placed a duty on public bodies to consider social value when procuring goods and services.
Specifically, the act states that an authority must consider “how what is proposed to be procured might improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of the relevant area” and “how, in conducting the process of procurement, it might act with a view to securing that improvement”.
The implications of the act were obvious for charities and other third sector bodies that depend on public sector grants to carry out their work: in short, in order to be eligible for funding, they would have to provide solid evidence of the social benefits of their activities.
“The third sector certainly knows a lot about the act because now when they’re pitching to local authorities or government institutions those authorities will expect you to be able to explain the social value that will be generated by the work you do with them,” says Alistair Watson, head of planning and environment at law firm Taylor Wessing, which represents Brentford FC. “It’s a way of putting some numbers behind a funding bid.”
When taking on Brentford FC as a client, Watson saw an opportunity to use the Social Value Act to help make the case to Hounslow Council for planning permission. The club has a long and celebrated history of working closely with its surrounding community. In its 27-year history, its community trust has won the Football League Community Club of the Year award five times and it currently works with more than 27,000 local people each year across 178 projects concerning sports participation, health, education and social inclusion.
“We’ve always been at the heart of our community,” says Chris Gammon, the director of Brentford FC’s development subsidiary Lionel Road Developments. “Our community trust has outgrown the space we have in the current stadium and has had to move out. The new stadium would give the trust a purpose-built space and new facilities including a climbing wall and dedicated classrooms.”
If Brentford FC’s community activities would not only be protected but also enhanced by a new stadium, Watson reasoned, surely there was a case to be made under the Social Value Act for the scheme to be allowed to go ahead. On this basis, the club and Taylor Wessing engaged the services of consultancy Substance, which specialises in work concerning the social value of sport.
Substance has developed a tool it calls Sport Works, which it uses to put an objective financial value on sporting outreach programmes. “Increasingly, we were finding that people thought that anecdotal stories were nice, but maybe there were other stories that demonstrated something else,” says Tim Crabbe, chair and director of strategy at Substance. “They were looking for something to quantify the benefits in monetary terms.”
While it is easy to be sceptical about putting a financial value on something as intangible as social value, it has to be said that Sport Works has been subject to rigorous peer review — and was considered sufficiently robust to be taken seriously by Hounslow Council, the Greater London Authority and the Department for Communities and Local Government.
It also seems to be based on some widely accepted social science. Crabbe makes an analogy with the insurance industry. “When you ring up for an insurance quote, that quote is based on how old you are, what gender you are, where you live and so on,” he says. “They build a risk profile. We’re able to do that for the people the club has worked with.”
The model works by examining the costs involved in, for instance, young people from particular social backgrounds getting involved in crime, inputting the reduced likelihood of that happening after participation on one of Brentford FC’s programmes and thereby calculating the saving to society. “If we can see that certain activities reduce the likelihood of somebody getting involved in the criminal justice system, we can put a price tag on that,” says Crabbe. Similar calculations can be made for other age groups and in areas such as health and employment.
Ultimately, the value of Brentford FC’s work in the community was calculated to be £8m a year historically and £11m a year if its stadium plans were allowed to proceed, something that Taylor Wessing’s Watson sought to use as a bargaining chip in the planning process.
A commitment to community activities played a critical role in section 106 planning gain negotiations on the project, with the club committing to run activities for the lifetime of the new stadium. If Brentford FC were to inhabit the stadium for as long as it has been at Griffin Park, that would mean a social value contribution well in excess of £1bn.
“We put it into the section 106 agreement and what the club and its trust have done is covenanted to run the wide range of programmes in Hounslow, and also in Richmond and Ealing,” says Watson. “Those can be added to over the years, but the concept of social value in a planning sense is a first: it’s the first time that measuring the value of social benefits has been used in a planning context.”
In the end, the Brentford FC section 106 agreement also included no commitment to contribute to affordable housing in Hounslow. However, Watson plays down any connection between the promised £11m a year in social value and the lack of an affordable housing contribution. Whether or not the case for the club’s social benefits had been made, he says, it simply wasn’t financially viable for the scheme to include an element of affordable housing.
“The initial phases of homes couldn’t at current prices and assumptions include affordable housing,” he says. “But there is an uplift provision in the section 106 agreement that allows the council in future years to say ‘hold on, land values have now shifted and you can now pay for affordable housing’. If there’s a viability review in two years’ time and it shows that it is possible, that’s when the council will get a lump sum for affordable housing.”
This, Watson says, is a good model for any planning authority worried that the Social Value Act will be used by developers to argue against the inclusion of affordable housing in their plans.
So the deal is done, but what next for the use of the Social Value Act? According to Watson, Taylor Wessing’s work with Brentford FC has already led to further opportunities. The firm is acting on behalf of a further four sporting institutions - two football clubs and two rugby clubs - with one of the organisations examining how housing a free school within its redevelopment plans could improve its planning benefits package.
However, Watson doesn’t believe that the use of the Social Value Act will be restricted to schemes involving sporting institutions. While he doubts a straight office development could make use of the act, he sees no reason why it shouldn’t be used to make the case for housing projects or mixed-use schemes.
Of course, developers have long played the numbers game in making their case for planning permission, with promises of high numbers of jobs to be created or the contribution of vast new areas of public parks. It’s also not uncommon for developers to claim that their plans will bring untold social benefits.
But what the Social Value Act — and Taylor Wessing’s work at Brentford FC — means is that for the first time developers can put some solid numbers behind their claims and expect that they will be taken seriously as a material consideration by planners.
Chinman3000
Well-known member
- Sep 28, 2011
- 1,269
butchy
Well-known member
If anyone has a spare ticket for the terrace please PM me - a mate was a little slow getting himself organised. cheers
Return of the Rev
Well-known member
me+ little rev
The Kid Frankie
New member
- Sep 5, 2012
- 2,082
Yeah same.
Puppet Master
non sequitur
- Aug 14, 2012
- 4,056
Can't seem to buy any now
Goring-by-Seagull
Well-known member
- Jan 5, 2012
- 1,981
[MENTION=18690]KJP[/MENTION] has a seating ticket but would like to swap with anyone who has standing.. Get in touch if you can help please!
Richard_419
Member
again, same here wanted to go and several colleagues are but i was the last getting organised as had to wait for payday..... if anyone has a spare terrace ticket i would happily take it off your hands