Former MP Karen Buck Appointed as Chair of OPDC
Will oversee regeneration around Old Oak Common and Park Royal
Dame Karen Buck
December 3, 2024
A former Labour MP has been appointed as the chair of the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC).
Dame Karen Buck will now oversee London’s largest brownfield regeneration project, where thousands of homes and a vast high-speed railway station are being built.
She stood down as MP for Westminster North at July’s general election, was last month nominated to the position by mayor Sadiq Khan.
The corporation is the planning authority for the redevelopment of 650 hectares of land around the planned High Speed 2 station at Old Oak Common, which will also be served by the Elizabeth line.
The appointment of Dame Karen, who chaired Mr Khan’s re-election campaign earlier this year, comes after it was announced in August that the current chair, Liz Peace, would be stepping down – having held the role since 2017.
Dame Karen faced questions about her suitability for the role on Monday (2 December) morning, at a meeting of the London Assembly’s confirmation hearings committee.
The cross-party committee unanimously agreed to nod her appointment through after almost two hours of questions, with members saying she gave “excellent answers” and seemed to have a “solid grasp” of the job’s responsibilities. Dame Karen will take up the role in January.
The OPDC, which was created by Boris Johnson in 2015, has “not had a glorious track record”, committee chair Neil Garratt said.
He pointed to the fact that the corporation in 2019 had to ‘hand back’ £250m of provisionally-awarded Government cash, after used car dealership Cargiant successfully disputed the OPDC’s application to acquire its land through a compulsory purchase order. It meant that almost 6,000 proposed homes had to be removed from the corporation’s masterplan.
Dame Karen, who served as a junior transport minister under Tony Blair, said that “most huge developments will have knockbacks at some point” but that “lessons have been learnt” and the OPDC is now a “transformed organisation”.
The former MP stressed she “feels passionately” about ensuring that the corporation delivers on its target of 50 per cent of the new homes being classed as ‘affordable’ – with “a strong bias towards social [homes] within that”.
Dame Karen was first elected as a local councillor in Westminster in 1990, before becoming an MP in 1997. Reflecting on those 34 years in public office, she said, “Probably from the first day of being an elected representative in Westminster, housing need has been the single biggest issue.
“Over the course of those decades, we have seen a steady loss of affordable housing and a steady loss of social housing in particular – as ‘right to buy’ eroded the stock and [it] wasn’t replaced.”
She added that London local authorities are now paying £4m a day on housing homeless households “in very expensive, private rented accommodation”.
Asked by Mr Garratt whether imposing an “iron-clad” benchmark for 50 per cent affordable housing could make parts of the project unviable and end up delaying the delivery of all types of housing, Dame Karen said she was “very confident” that that the target was achievable and that it would be “absolutely central” to the corporation’s work.
“We absolutely have to do this,” she said. “We have to make sure that the affordable component [of the] housing is not the thing that always drops off the side of the table, because it so frequently does.”
According to the latest edition of the mayor’s London Plan, published in 2021, the OPDC has been tasked with delivering a total of 13,670 new homes in the ten years leading up to March 2029.
As of May this year, some 7,789 homes had been approved and over 4,000 homes completed since the OPDC’s inception. The committee was told that 38 per cent of the homes delivered so far are classed as ‘affordable’.
Noah Vickers - Local Democracy Reporter