As City Planning Officer for the City of London, Peter Rees led the planning and regeneration of this world’s business and financial centre from 1985 to 2014.  Today, Peter is Professor of Places and City Planning at UCL. He lectures internationally and advises developers and cities around the world on urban planning and design. 

Peter is a founder member and director of the British Council for Offices and received the President’s Award in 2003 for “presiding over one of the most extensive periods of redevelopment in the City’s long history.”   

Famously, Peter preferred to keep the City as a place just ‘for business’. In this episode, Kauntze asks whether he thinks this could change in the coming years, perhaps as a result of COVID-19.  Planning in The City is covered throughout the episode, as well as what office designers can do to make their office stand out, and give people a reason to not just work from home.

Bill Price is a director at WSP and a structural engineer by background. His career has included buildings across many sectors usually delivering multidisciplinary engineering services. He was responsible for the early design development stages of the Shard and associated with all the projects at London Bridge helping to raise the profile of tall buildings in London especially around transport nodes.   

Since 2012 Bill has been closely associated with the delivery and thought leadership around rail overbuild. Bill authored and led the production of the WSP papers ‘Building our way out of a crisis’, ‘Out of Thin Air’ and ‘Out of Thin Air – one year on’. He has presented on the topic at many conferences and events in the UK, continental Europe and Australia.  

Bill has been a long term supporter of the BCO and led the conference technical tour programmes for New York, Madrid, Chicago, London and the recently postponed Toronto. In 2016 Bill co-edited ‘A Strategic Design Guide to Tall Buildings’ for the British Council for Offices and published by the RIBA.

Clare Ashmore has been at Parkeray for 20 years, a main board member for 14 years and was promoted to Group Board | Chief Operating Officer in January of this year. Her role covers all aspects of that of a COO (spinning plates) but has a keen drive on wellbeing, brand and ethos experience.  Clare has always focused on developing young people within our industry being on one of the first committees for Young Entrepreneurs in Property from 2002 and as board member at Women in Property, ran Schools Roadshows and Business Breakfasts with London Schools giving students a glimpse of the property industry.  Clare continues as Chair of the Mentoring Committee within the BCO of which she has been a board member for the past 9 years, supporting the #BCONextGen.

Paul Finch is Programme Director of the World Architecture Festival (WAF) and Editorial Director of The Architectural Review/Architects’ Journal. He started professional life as a journalist in the early 1970s. He became Deputy Editor of Estates Times (now Property Week), and subsequently edited Building Design, Architects’ Journal and Architectural Review, where he launched WAF in 2008.   

He has been co-editor of Planning in London since 1994. He was a founder commissioner at CABE (Commission for Architecture & the Built Environment) in 1999, chaired its design review and regional panels, subsequently chairing its London Olympics design panel from 2005 to 2012. He became chair in 2010, overseeing its merger in 2011 with the Design Council, where he was deputy chair for three years.   

He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Westminster and honorary fellowships from University College London and the Royal Institute of British Architects .He is an honorary member of the British Council for Offices and the Architectural Association. He was awarded an OBE for services to architecture in 2002.

We hear from Lindsey Barrett, Chair of the London NextGen Committee on the legal impacts COVID-19 is having on the market and what we might expect from corporate occupiers. We also cover her ambitions for the NextGen, advice for today's grads and what could be done to improve diversity in the CRE sector.

In the final episode of the New Normal series, we hear from Danny Parmar, Chair of the BCO Midlands and East Anglia region. Danny is Business Development Manager with Overbury, with a major focus on Birmingham and Cambridge. In 2015, Danny built a BCO sub-chapter from scratch in Cambridge to harness its vibrant office sector.

Sir Craig Oliver was the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron’s Director of Politics and Communications for over six years, responsible for the Government’s strategy and messaging.  During that time he was Director of Communications on a number of political campaign teams, including the 2015 General Election (winning an unexpected overall majority). 

His day-to-day work in this role included a radical overhaul of government communications, making them fit for the digital age.  In this 'New Normal' special, BCO's Chief Exec, Richard Kauntze and Sir Craig Oliver discuss the UK and International Governments' handling of the Covid-19 crisis so far, Brexit, and the longer-term impact of the Covid-19 crisis.

"Big businesses and small have been helpful, ingenious, inventive, innovative, they have come up with lots of solutions” – Martin Vander Weyer, Spectator business editor, discusses the economy, Brexit and capitalism in the time of COVID-19 in our latest #NewNormal

The United States is Britain’s closest ally. Richard Kauntze asks Sir Christopher Meyer how he thinks it currently stands and whether he thinks Trump will be re-elected for a second term this November.  

Richard also says that following Britain’s departure from the EU, there has been much talk of the benefits of a comprehensive trade deal with the US, but America fights hard in trade negotiations and asks Sir Christopher what he thinks the chances of a good deal are for both sides, and much much more in this not-to-be-missed 3rd New Normal Special on diplomacy and international relations.