Strategy shake-ups, retrofit rethinks, designing for dustbins and placemaking pragmatists - here are my favourite insights from UKREiiF 2025. 

Your takeaways from UKREiiF 2025 might depend on your disposition. 

Prone to worry? Then you probably left mulling the sector’s still-stubborn viability challenges. Or how gaps in public policy are holding back development. Or how much there is still to do – on planning reform, on unlocking alternative finance, and on building the affordable homes we keep promising to deliver.

But for those with a disposition to match the glorious weather we all enjoyed in Leeds, there were ideas - so many ideas. You can read my first piece from the conference here and, let's be honest, it wasn’t necessarily uplifting - so I'm here to provide balance. Of the many interesting suggestions I heard last week, here are five of my favourites, spanning flashes of originality, easy wins and genuinely bold ideas.

1. Building Feasible Challengers to London's Supremacy

Some will argue that UK regional hubs already challenge London – and we’re one of them. At our ‘Next X & The Government Property Agency’ panel, BNP Paribas Real Estate researcher Josh Arnold pointed out that Leeds, Bristol and Cambridge outperform London on BNP Paribas Real Estate’s new start-up hotspot index.

While London still outperforms in terms of size and catchment, regional markets offer a diverse mix of qualities that support start-up ecosystems. Leeds, for example, outperforms in terms of its productivity score, talent score and connectivity score. This is helped in part by strong ties between universities and industry, supporting graduate retention and start-up rates. Its growing coworking landscape has also supported start-ups and smaller enterprises by providing flexibility and collaborative workspaces.

Leeds may lack London or Manchester’s scale, but that’s precisely where government can act as a market catalyst, Mark Bourgeois, chief executive of the Government Property Agency, told our panel. Moving operations out of London is saving money due to lower rents and operational costs and they draw in private investment. The Government leads from the front to create the regeneration catalyst needed where there isn’t scale. 

This has long been the theory behind the GPA, but now it's happening. In Darlington and Peterborough, the GPA’s hub strategy is already turning policy into place-making. In Darlington, for instance, the Treasury, Department for Education and Department for Business and Trade now share a single site, creating not just operational efficiency but genuine civic momentum.  

“In space planning there, there is real value in having a collection of, or a centre of skills,” Bourgeois said. “Us being able to form part of a local thematic skills infrastructure is really, really important.”

2. Give Planning Officers Statutory Powers

Among a flurry of reform ideas, one stood out for its potential to reshape the culture of UK planning. David Baker-Brook, Associate Director at Caddick, proposed giving planning officers a formal statutory duty — elevating their role, insulating them from political interference, and giving them the confidence and autonomy to approve good schemes. 

“That kind of responsibility gives them more confidence to make decisions,” he said. “It means that there’s less political leaning on Planning Officers… and they’re held up and trusted to do that role.” He added that the shift could have knock-on effects for resourcing, speed and quality throughout the system.

Others on the panel supported the principle - especially if combined with developers paying for early access to case officers and consultees. The government's plans to cut the number of statutory consultees are a welcome start, but this idea goes much further. It suggests a simpler, more streamlined system where trained professionals are empowered to say yes - and are backed when they do. In a week full of technical fixes, this one was quietly radical. 

3. Rethinking Retrofit: More Than Just Carbon

Evolving government policy has lured some developers into a narrow way of thinking. By using EPC ratings as the benchmark for success, it’s encouraged a tick-box approach to retrofitting – one that can prioritise compliance over performance, and short-term gains over long-term value. At best, that risks missing opportunities to futureproof buildings properly. At worst, it bakes in obsolescence: upgrades that meet today’s standards but leave assets exposed to climate risk, tenant dissatisfaction or stranded assets later on.

Marion Baeli, Principal for Sustainability Transformation at 10 Design, made the case for a much broader approach. Energy efficiency matters, she said, but it’s just one part of the equation. Effective retrofitting also means grappling with embodied carbon, comfort and overheating, building services like ventilation and shading, spatial and aesthetic quality, and long-term economic performance. Without that, buildings risk becoming unlettable, unliveable or financially stranded – even if they’ve technically met today’s rules. 

Baeli urged investors and designers to plan retrofit as a system, not a checklist – so it delivers performance, resilience and usability over decades, not just to 2030 or EPC Band B. Carbon is important – but it’s nowhere near enough on its own to futureproof a building. Flexibility is also part of the puzzle: if you conduct an expensive redevelopment, it’s vital to ensure the property can flex to future market demand.

4. Design for Planning – But Also For People

There were other examples of similar shifts in thinking – better ways of approaching novel challenges with a longer-term mindset. Félicie Krikler, head of residential at Barr Gazetas, offered a sharp reminder that good design isn’t just about securing planning consent – it’s about creating value that endures. In the living sectors, particularly BTR and co-living, success starts with thinking operationally from the beginning, which means involving property managers before the planning application is even submitted.

“When I was working with Grainger at the pre-planning stage, we would have meetings with the operational team,” she said, “and they would go, ‘I’m not taking the bins from here to there every single day – because otherwise, ends up being my job. That’s what I will do every single day.’”

It’s a simple point, but it unlocks meaningful savings. Efficient layouts reduce staffing and maintenance costs, keep service charges down and ultimately support viability. This is a different mindset to for-sale housing, where once a home is sold, the developer’s job is done. In the living sectors, the asset is held for the long term – so every design decision carries operational consequences. Krikler called for architects to rethink the brief: don’t just hit planning requirements, design something that can be run efficiently for 30 years. And start by asking the people who’ll be hauling the bins.

5. Reframing Affordable Housing As Infrastructure

It's becoming increasingly clear that affordable housing delivery will continue to lag far behind targets without a more substantial policy shift. One such shift, argued James Barrett, Head of Affordable Housing at BNP Paribas Real Estate, would be to formally reclassify affordable housing as infrastructure. Speaking on a panel about delivery bottlenecks, he pointed out that housing is treated very differently from sectors like transport or education—even though its societal importance and long-term returns are comparable. Infrastructure status, he argued, could help unlock institutional capital, bring delivery into strategic funding pipelines, and allow housing to access the same government-backed investment mechanisms already used to accelerate schools, roads and rail.

Research from the think-tank Localis supports the idea, suggesting that reframing affordable housing as a core infrastructure asset could be the key to unlocking long-term capital from sources like local government pension schemes. By treating housing as an investable, income-generating public good, councils and central government could work with institutional investors to scale delivery in a way that’s commercially viable and socially valuable. As Localis put it, this approach could “open the door to a new public-private delivery model” capable of meeting the UK’s urgent need for sub-market housing.