| Employment: There certainly are things that the development on the railway lands [King's Cross Central] could do. One is I think if it could be made to provide space for small and medium enterprises as well as just large corporations that would make it much more probable that more fairly local people would find employment, not necessarily people from within walking distance but citizens of Inner London, if you like, who need jobs, rather more likely on the whole to find them in smaller enterprises, particularly if that includes a lot of this non profit charitable and other services of that kind. So that’s one thing. And I am not very optimistic that that’s what Argent have in mind; they seem to be aiming at a rather high rent paying corporate group; we’ll see about that. The second very important thing of course is to do with training and education, because to some extent, although you can exaggerate this a lot, but to some extent, people round here who are unemployed would have a better chance of employment with more training and education. A lot of people have missed out on schooling or come from other countries, or one way or another have not fully exploited their capacities, and education and training could help, and it does; and we know from other research that if training and education projects are really targeted well enough with enough resources, they can really help change people’s position in the society, and provisions to do all that could form part of this new development, certainly. [Marian Larragy] That would need to be built into the planning application? Well you can’t quite put it into a planning application or permission, but it could be built into this thing called the Section 106 Agreement which is a kind of side contract between developers and the local authorities in which developers agree to finance certain operations, and certainly it’s the sort of thing they could do. This transcript is part of King's Cross Central - A Development Challenge |