Michael Gove has been bold over M&S Oxford Street. But it’s not enough

Extreme temperatures are sweeping the globe and went over 50°C in parts of the US and China last weekend while most Italian cities are on red alert because of the threat to human life.

Smoke from Canada's wildfires has once again blanketed swathes of the US, leaving tens of millions of Americans under air quality advisories, while extreme flooding in South Korea has destroyed hundreds of buildings and killed 46. We used to predict events such as these; now we are (mostly) living through them, leaving the planet's goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C hanging by a thread.

Despite its well-known environmental pledge Plan A, Marks & Spencer doesn’t seem to have noticed. That's if its reaction to yesterday’s decision by Michael Gove concerning its Oxford Street store is anything to go by. The community secretary heeded arguments from chief opponent SAVE Britain’s Heritage and the AJ’s own RetroFirst campaign and overruled planning inspector David Nicholson, ruling that M&S will not be allowed to bulldoze and replace its flagship Marble Arch store at an upfront cost of 40,000 tonnes of CO₂. He was surely right to wait until as late as possible into the summer – the day before a trio of much-anticipated by-elections – to announce his dramatic verdict because the backlash from M&S and its allies has been fierce.

‘Utterly pathetic,’ growled the retailer’s angry chief executive Stuart Machin and promptly doubled down on the company’s earlier threat to leave the country’s busiest shopping street, complaining that its valuable West End investment plan was now in the ‘deep freeze’. Clive Black, an analyst at investment group Shore Capital, told The Times that Gove had demonstrated ‘incompetence’ by blocking an exciting development and thousands of jobs. The business-as-usual lobby is strong and it is not going away.

And that is why Gove’s decision, bold as it is, is not enough on its own to reset our carbon-guzzling property and construction sector.

While the verdict will send shockwaves through the system and undoubtedly make developers think harder about demolition, it does not on its own provide the certainty on reaching net zero that most in the sector are calling for. Why? Because here in Britain we have a policy vacuum on embodied carbon and a tax system that props up the very thing Gove was arguing against. The government urgently needs to join the dots. It needs to recall the words of former Bank of England governor Mark Carney when he warned we would not meet net zero without 'rewiring' our economy.

There's a policy vacuum on embodied carbon and a tax system which props up demolition

When it comes to building stuff, as consistently argued by our RetroFirst campaign and the government’s top climate adviser John Gummer only last month, it is perverse that refurbishment and retrofit, the naturally lower-carbon form of development, is taxed at the full 20 per cent rate of VAT while other sectors such as new-build housing are zero rated.

On the regulation front, meanwhile, we are rapidly falling behind a host of other countries such as France and Denmark, the latter of which recently set embodied carbon limits for all schemes over 1,000m². When offered the chance to do something similar, albeit slightly weaker, last autumn through the building regs via a private members bill introduced by Tory MP Jerome Mayhew, the government rejected it, kicking the issue into the long grass by announcing a lengthy and unnecessary consultation with industry.

Given this backdrop, it is no wonder that M&S feel singled out by a planning decision that goes completely against the grain.

Machin was surely right to point out that his Pilbrow & Partners-designed scheme had been supported at every stage of the planning system until now, and to complain that scores of major demolition projects are happening all over London as we speak. Let's not forget we are pulling down 50,000 buildings in the UK every year.

Michael Gove is a highly controversial figure, especially among architects. But he has conviction and he remains the only front-bench politician consistently drawing attention to the ultra-high carbon cost of new materials like steel and concrete. Where are all the others?

Source:Matthew Andrews/SAVE

The M&S store on Oxford Street which had been earmarked for demolition