“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” - Henry Ford
Mills & Reeve and Savills hosted a roundtable at this year’s UKREiiF exploring the role of public and private sector partnerships in delivering development across the UK. The discussion brought together experienced voices from across the industry and highlighted what many already recognise all too well: partnership is not a simple solution to delivery challenges. It is nuanced, varied in form, and often as difficult to sustain as it can be to establish.
In this article, we summarise the key themes that emerged from this roundtable:
- What partnership means in practice
- The nature of public sector intervention
- Risk
- Control
- Access
A central theme was the need for a clearer understanding and common language to articulate what “partnership” means in practice. There is no single successful model: much depends upon the location, scale, and particular challenges of each scheme. Those may shift over time. Rather than a set of finite structures, public–private partnerships are better understood as a spectrum—from formal joint ventures to more informal collaboration (and sometimes combinations of both). It was agreed that success is as much about a partnership where there is a genuine alignment of purpose and the realities of delivery, as it is about legal structure. The need to accept and navigate inherent flexibility for strategic schemes of scale is a testament to that.
The discussion also challenged the traditional narrative that partnerships are solely about public funding paired with private sector expertise. While funding remains important, the value of public sector intervention is increasingly recognised in its broader contribution to delivery—through focussed deployment of planning powers, facilitating regulatory alignment, and access to specialist expertise for those who would otherwise perhaps go without (albeit with the latter the private sector can of course play its part where public resources are strained). With grant funding constrained and any form of debt presenting challenges to viability, mechanisms such as equity guarantees were also seen as particularly valuable.
Risk emerged as a key tension in many partnership arrangements. There was a sentiment that the public sector often operated with a perception of risk that inhibited delivery: some experienced that the very schemes in most need of public intervention are often the ones that struggled to attract support. The more successful examples discussed could demonstrate early, shared risk allocation across all partners (often through rewarding private sector partners achieving defined milestones early), thereby incentivising delivery.
To add to the challenge of acceptable levels of risk were the pressures of viability affecting everyone. There remained a clear role for the public sector in leading a patient approach to capital return from development assets —particularly at the outset of the development lifecycle. These aren’t new concepts (evidenced not least by the delivery of previous generations of new towns), but there was a strong sense that traditional measures of “success” from development need to evolve, especially where outcomes extend beyond immediate financial metrics. It was felt that a change in how success is conceived and when it is benchmarked was more likely to come from the public sector. It was best placed to support delivery where its impact would be greatest: money not being the only number that matters. Few would argue that the 165,000 Reasons campaign initiated by Cratus to be one of the most powerful stories to have resonated at this year’s UKREiiF.
It was also noted that tensions in partnerships often extend to issues of control. Private sector participants noted that public sector involvement—particularly where funding is provided—can introduce levels of control that complicate if not seriously delay and inhibit delivery.
Effective partnership therefore depends on robust governance balanced ultimately with trust, and a shared understanding of delivery realities. Early alignment on vision and objectives, risk appetite and exit strategies was seen as essential to avoid continuous protracted negotiations. Transparency and flexibility were identified as key enablers to working together in the long term.
Finally, access to partnership remains a challenge, particularly for SMEs. The cost and complexity of procurement can act as a barrier to entry, and while some ‘closed competition’ initiatives are beginning to address this, questions remain as to how inclusive the majority of current frameworks are in practice.
Ultimately, the discussion reaffirmed that successful public–private partnerships are shaped as much by how parties work together as by the structures they adopt. Getting the fundamentals right – clarity, trust and shared ambition – remains critical. Or, as Henry Ford reminds us, the real measure of success lies not simply in coming together, but in working together too.
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