Affordable workspace can provide start ups and small businesses with affordable, flexible support that they need to grow and flourish. They help to:
- support and nurture small businesses
- provide social and cultural value to the local community
- improve the local economy
- attract local residents and international visitors
- provide a key placemaker from the early stages of mixed-use development.
Brent’s Affordable Workspace Strategy was approved by Cabinet in September 2020. It proposes initiatives to increase affordable workspace and deliver business and employment growth in the borough. Key actions include increasing the number of Affordable Workspace Operators, bringing workspaces to vacant shops, new planning guidance, and creating a Workspace Investment Fund.
You will find more information about the work we are doing in the adopted Affordable Workspace Strategy and the Action Plan. Please email affordableworkspace@brent.gov.uk for a fully accessible version or a print version of the document.
The key actions coming out of this strategy are:
- Develop a Brent Affordable Workspace Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) to expand on draft Local Plan Policy BE1.
- Expand the Affordable Workspace Operator list to give developers a better range of options when disposing affordable workspace, and improve the local affordable workspace offer.
- Create or facilitate affordable workspace projects in vacant and hard to let properties on the high street.
- Inform and direct business cases for workspaces in Council assets and developments, specific to location and context, for how best to develop and manage the workspace.
- Facilitate and optimise affordable workspace delivery in mixed-use development in site allocations that trigger draft Local Plan Policy BE1 and BE2.
- Agree a forward plan for using S106 commuted sums collected in lieu of onsite affordable workspace.
- Work with economic development and finance colleagues to create a specific discretionary business rate relief for Affordable Workspace Operators.
- Develop and launch a Brent finance and grant scheme for Affordable Workspace Operators with a focus on either location or sector.