‘We’re putting the park back into east London’: the LLDC’s new chief on ‘activating’ inclusive growth

‘Activation optimisation’

Thirteen years on from the Games, the park’s metamorphosis reached a new milestone this year as several major cultural and educational institutions opened their doors.

The park’s East Bank cultural centre includes new premises for BBC Studios, dance theatre Sadler’s Wells, museum the V&A East Storehouse and higher education institutions UCL and London College of Fashion, all now open. But for Ms Hussain, the completion of these venues is not an end in itself, but the beginning of a new challenge.

Recognised as one of just three ‘innovation districts’ in the 2025 Growth Plan, the park has a stated aim to be the “world’s most inclusive” such district. That means ensuring these institutions are capitalised on at a local level.

“We’ve done the build, and now it’s about making sure that we don’t just have a park that’s internationally recognised, that’s globally relevant,” Ms Hussain says. “We’ve got all these amazing anchor institutions – there is a risk that you could just have a park with lots of great assets on it. But how do you make them ‘work’?”

On this, Ms Hussain refers to park’s origins, and its mission. This (as set out on the LLDC’s website) is to use the opportunity of the 2012 Games and the creation of the park to “change the lives of people in east London and drive growth and investment in London and the UK, by developing an inspiring and innovative place where people want – and can afford – to live, work and visit”.

It is the first of these objectives that is most important for Ms Hussain – changing lives of east Londoners. Bringing the 2012 Olympic Games to the area was, she recalls, “a catalytical moment” for many of those working in local boroughs at the time, herself included. This first phase drove forward efforts to encourage the city to “pivot to east London and see all this opportunity”.

The second phase, covering the 10 to 15 years following the games themselves, has been about building out the park, repurposing the sporting venues within its parameters and developing new neighbourhoods.

“A lot of that was about having [the LLDC’s] planning powers and making sure that we were able to maximise the potential of the landholdings, working with the boroughs. And we’ve done that.”

It is with this in mind that the new chief executive dubs the third phase – with which her arrival at a reshaped LLDC coincides – as “activation-optimisation”. That is: making the park part and parcel of the localities within which it sits and working very closely with the four boroughs its parameters span: Hackney, Waltham Forest, Newham and Tower Hamlets. This phase is expected to extend into the 2030s.

“Most importantly, we’re talking about growth being inclusive, so really activating that, and optimising that, and using the assets that we have, but also the investment that we can continue to bring.”

Of the four partner boroughs, Ms Hussain has previously worked directly for two: Waltham Forest and Tower Hamlets. Earlier in her career she also worked for a regeneration company within a third, Newham.

Ms Hussain’s most recent roles were as deputy chief executive of Waltham Forest for the two years prior to joining the LLDC and, before that, assistant chief executive at Brent Council.

These, and other career experiences, have shaped the LLDC chief executive’s awareness of the scale of the opportunity that Stratford’s East Bank cultural quarter brings. “Often when you’re trying to do inclusive growth and you’re trying to really think about ‘what does true regeneration mean for our communities’, you often don’t have the assets – you don’t have the universities [or] the big anchor institutions like the BBC or Sadler’s Wells.

“So for me, the opportunity that brings is to truly think about growth and to link it into the London mayor’s plan and what Sadiq Khan is saying about our future: repositioning ourselves as a global city, but also really thinking about how do we optimise on the growth and the investment?

“And, for me, how we make sure that’s relevant for London is the most important: how that’s relevant to east Londoners.”

This means thinking about skills and employment, including via the LLDC’s ‘good growth hub’, a cultural and digital sector recruitment service for young people, and its annual ‘East Careers Week’, which this year engaged with more than 1,500 students from secondary schools and further education institutions across the growth boroughs. In addition, the Build East Construction Training Centre at East Wick is focused on supporting local residents to develop retrofit and insulation skills.

Ms Hussain says: “[It’s about] not treating our community as if it’s a community of deficit, [because] actually it’s a community of optimisation and opportunity.”

She adds: “Our future marketing audiences, our future curators, our future creators are sitting among us. How do we make sure that this really engages with them and activates them?”

Relinquishing planning powers

The increased focus by the park’s leadership towards the boroughs around it coincides with some key powers passing in the same direction.

After being established as the first ever mayoral development corporation (MDC) in 2012, the LLDC had acted as local planning authority for new developments within its boundaries, with the power to approve or reject proposals, and to give guidance to developers. This was intended to enable it to deliver the physical legacy of the Games, as a single body with “responsibility for co-ordinating regeneration, development and planning within the area for which it had been established”, as legislation set out at the time.

In December, following a mayoral decision two years earlier, those planning powers were handed back to the four boroughs. The LLDC’s boundaries were at the same time reduced to primarily include the areas where the corporation owns, manages or operates land.

The LLDC’s governance structure and board were then reconstituted in April 2025, with a smaller headcount to reflect the new remit.

For Ms Hussain, the removal of planning powers is not a loss in itself, but representative of the requirements of the current phase. “People often talk about… the fact that the planning powers are handed over. But that [change is] OK, because that wasn’t the ‘all’ of what we did. That is a part of what we did and actually, for that period, we needed the planning powers to be able to work and make sure that we were building the types of developments and housing that we need to do.

“We’ve done that. We’ve done the master planning, and now what we need to do is work in a partnership way with our boroughs.”

The LLDC remains a mayoral development corporation, and as a part of the Greater London Authority (GLA), the LLDC’s relationship with the mayor continues to be “very close”, Ms Hussain says. “They continue to invest in us as a place, as well,” she adds.

Housing: a ‘central focus’

The LLDC’s focus on inclusive growth would be a hollow pledge without an accompanying focus on housing, and affordable homes at that.

While some earlier schemes reflect targets in line with previous mayoral policy of 35 per cent, the corporation is now targeting 50 per cent affordable across its remaining portfolio by the mid-2030s, by which time all its housing stock will have been completed. This is in line with the 2021 London Plan.

“Affordable housing is absolutely our central focus,” Ms Hussain says.

“We’re absolutely committed to that [50 per cent affordable target], and that is a very clear directive from the London mayor as well. This place is for living and for working and for visiting, and it needs to do all three. So we want to make sure that we have five neighbourhoods of communities who live here.”

Together, approximately 5,877 homes will be delivered on LLDC-owned land (of which around 1,392 have been delivered to date), and a total of 33,000 homes are expected across the wider legacy area in partnership with the boroughs. This figure was set out in the LLDC’s 2020-2036 Local Plan, and more than a third of these (13,000 homes, including purpose-built student accommodation and co-living) had been completed by December 2024 when the corporation’s planning powers were handed back to the boroughs. It will now be in the hands of the partner boroughs to progress the delivery of the remaining homes.