A planning decision rarely feels like a story. It looks more like a file, a timetable, a set of drawings, a deadline that arrives on a Tuesday.

Yet to Nick Millican, the CEO of Greycoat Real Estate, that file is not paperwork. It is the moment where a city chooses how it will work.

Millican has led Greycoat as CEO since 2012, with overall responsibility for investment, strategic asset management, and capital partner relationships.  He sits at the intersection where global capital meets local streets. The friction point is often the local council, because that is where civic priorities, community impact, and the practical limits of development collide.

What he would like councils to understand is not a plea for looser rules. It is an argument for clearer outcomes and steadier process, so the built environment can evolve in ways that benefit the people who use it.

Councils are not only regulators, they are designers of outcomes

In central London, even modest changes can trigger complex scrutiny: neighbours, noise, overlooking, heritage context, management plans. A City of Westminster planning committee report from January 2025 shows how detailed this can become, down to screens, capacity controls, and operating rules for a roof terrace intended for office workers’ breaks. 

That granularity is not the problem. The problem is unpredictability.

The same report notes that the application became subject to an appeal against non-determination because a decision was not made within the eight-week period, even though the report’s recommendation indicates permission would have been granted.  In Millican’s world, time is not a nuisance. Time is a cost, and cost changes what gets built, what gets upgraded, and what gets abandoned.

A council process that reliably reaches decisions, with consistent expectations, acts like infrastructure. It allows developers, investors, and occupiers to plan around public priorities instead of guessing at them.

The strongest climate policy is the one that makes reuse normal

Councils are under pressure to deliver housing, support local employment, and respond to climate commitments. Millican’s work is often framed around a practical version of sustainability: make existing buildings work better, instead of defaulting to demolition.

Greycoat positions sustainability as central to its projects, emphasising greener spaces that support well-being and productivity with lower environmental impact.  In practice, this shows up in the kind of business plans councils increasingly need to see: comprehensive refurbishment and repositioning of existing office stock, rather than a blank-slate rebuild. 

A clear example is 20 Finsbury Dials in the City of London. Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Greycoat announced the closing of the acquisition in December 2023, describing it as a 140,000 square foot office building.  Greycoat’s own project summary describes a plan for comprehensive refurbishment and repositioning. 

From Nick Millican’s perspective, councils set the conditions that decide whether refurbishment is feasible at scale. That includes how applications are evaluated, how retrofit trade-offs are handled, and how policy aligns with the reality of complex urban sites.

Local councils should see capital as something that can be recruited, not merely managed

One of the hardest jobs for a council is unlocking large sites where the constraints are bigger than any single actor: infrastructure, phasing, community consultation, delivery risk.

In December 2024, the UK government announced a £250 million master developer joint venture involving Homes England, Oaktree Capital Management, and Greycoat, designed to unlock and accelerate large-scale development sites across England.  Trade coverage described the same partnership and its aim to accelerate delivery of large sites. 

The lesson here is not that councils should step back. It is that councils can help attract partners who can carry delivery risk, fund enabling works, and coordinate long timelines, if the public sector side is prepared to define what success looks like and keep that definition stable.

Greycoat’s own portfolio language for large initiatives points to the importance of involving the local community and consulting stakeholders as part of the delivery approach.  That is the kind of commitment councils want, and it becomes easier to demand when the process is legible.

The point of development is not volume, it is function

Millican’s day job is risk-adjusted returns, yet the deeper question he keeps circling is operational: does the project make the city work better?

For councils, “work better” is not a slogan. It is footfall that supports local businesses. It is offices that people actually use, because the space meets modern expectations. It is upgrades that reduce energy waste. It is amenities that do not spill problems into neighbouring blocks.

When councils treat commercial real estate as part of a civic system, rather than a separate private activity, the conversation changes. Conditions become tools. Planning becomes coordination. The council becomes the steward of a living place, with developers and capital partners as implementers.

That is what Nick Millican wants local councils to understand: the most effective planning framework does not choose between growth and standards. It creates standards that guide growth, with enough consistency that the best actors can commit to delivering them.

Learn more at the link below:

https://www.bbntimes.com/companies/greycoat-s-nick-millican-weighs-in-on-london-s-changing-approach-to-demolition