Crawley Town Investment Plan Summary

Crawley is one of 101 towns that has been selected by the government to receive up to £25 million of funding and investment. As a result, Crawley Borough Council and its partners have drawn up this Town Investment Plan (TIP), highlighting the range of priority projects that will help Crawley embrace its full potential and ensure the town can absorb more investment in the future. The plan takes into consideration the impact of the pandemic and looks at the recovery process already underway.

The projects discussed in this plan are endorsed and will be guided by the Crawley Town Deal Board, an established group of over 50 representatives from local businesses, community organisations and public organisations. This will ensure each project is focused on community and business needs.

The projects are presented in line with the government’s priority themes for the Towns Fund:

1. Urban regeneration
2. Skills and enterprise infrastructure
3. Connectivity

• The local economy grew by 23% from 2013 to 2018 to reach almost £6 billion per year, the fastest growth rate in West Sussex and one of the fastest in the south east
• At Coast to Capital level, Crawley has the second highest economic output after Brighton and Hove and in terms of five-year growth, has outperformed neighbouring Croydon (17%) and rivalled Brighton and Hove (24%)
• Manor Royal Business District has nine million square feet of commercial space and is home to a significant advanced engineering and aviation cluster including: Thales, Elekta, Varian Medical Systems, Vent-Axia, CGG, Doosan and Permasense, Boeing, Virgin Atlantic, easyJet, C.A.E, L3 Harris, Aerotron and Newrest
• Crawley has the second highest job density outside central London with 101,000 jobs - a 13.5% jobs growth since 2013
• The town centre is a major regional shopping destination, vibrant and successful, with major retail brand names, supplemented by a significant professional services business base and accommodating more than 3,000 jobs
• Gatwick Airport sits wholly within the borough while the M23 forms the southern and eastern borders. Gatwick Airport, which up to the crisis was the busiest single runway airport in the world, accommodates 24,000 on campus jobs and helps generate 85,000 jobs off site
• Crawley has four railway stations, including major London-Brighton mainline stations at Gatwick Airport and Three Bridges. The town is home to the Network Rail South East Regional Train Operating Centre and also a major Siemens train maintenance facility. Through Metrobus, Crawley has a modern hydrogen and hybrid fuelled bus fleet with an extensive Fastway bus network
• The town’s powerful leisure offer includes K2 Crawley Leisure Centre and Tilgate Park. K2 Crawley features an Olympic-size swimming pool, a regional athletics track and major gym and indoor sports provision. Crawley’s Tilgate Park is a Green Flag award- winning park, boasting Tilgate Nature Centre and excellent attractions. The town is also home to Crawley Town Football Club
• Crawley’s “green infrastructure” is extensive, with significant tree cover and areas of soft landscaping as well as a network of parks and open spaces. The “new town” urban design approach has created wide, tree-lined boulevards, with significant green space and green verge amenity throughout the town

Crawley will be a modern, vibrant, healthy, exemplar digital town with a transformed “green” economy, underpinned by high quality local services, state-of-the-art amenities, a pioneering advanced engineering Business Park and Fusion Centre at Manor Royal, alongside sustainable homes and transport.

Community: Strong and diverse, uniquely identifiable neighbourhoods with engaged communities who possess strong “social capital”.

Workforce: Highly competitive and empowered with high-level skills needed for green technology, advanced engineering, digital and professional services.

Skills training: Clear accessible pathways for residents to get into high quality jobs, driven by Crawley College with a local university at the “pinnacle”.

Town centre: Enriched cultural offer; a “virtual village”; state-of-the-art sustainability infrastructure; a professional services hub.

Manor Royal: A stunning digital Business Park with mixed-use employment and a high quality trading environment, including a highly productive green technology and advanced engineering business base.

Gatwick Airport: Exemplar of green aviation and sustainable growth with digital platforms offering excellent inter-modal transport connectivity for people and freight.

• The aviation industry has been hit the hardest with 10,000 passengers in April 2020 at Gatwick Airport, compared to four million in April 2019
• Virgin Atlantic and British Airways withdrawing from Gatwick, resulting in redundancies and an ongoing consultation regarding redundancies
• The town has seen a sharp increase in Universal Credit claimants with figures up from 2.4% (March) to 7.2% (May) including an increase in youth claimants up from four per cent to 11%
• One in three workers in Crawley – more than 20,000 – are furloughed
• Centre for Cities recently reported that 57% of Crawley’s jobs base is at risk and 60% of exporting jobs adversely impacted
• Hatch Regeneris reports Crawley as “most exposed” to job losses
• 42% drop in economic output possible

This plan responds to both the dynamic and ambitious vision for Crawley and the clear and present economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis by advocating the following cross-cutting strategic priorities around which the TIP’s Towns Fund project interventions will be framed:

• To achieve a dynamic, sustainable and digital economy in Crawley town centre, enabled by a 3,000 home neighbourhood, the growth of a rich cultural offer, a professional services hub and exemplary digital, green and sustainability infrastructure
• To enable a high value digital Business Park in Manor Royal, with a formidable reputation in advanced engineering innovation and green technologies, underpinned by state-of-the-art green infrastructure and sustainable transport connectivity
• To facilitate the green transformation of Crawley’s economy as part of the national drive to realise zero net carbon emissions by 2050, maximising investment locally in green business, green homes, green technologies, green transport and infrastructure
• To unlock a thriving virtual and physical university offer and community in Crawley, alongside exciting skills training and infrastructure driven by Crawley College, which creates pathways for local residents into high value jobs, yielding Research and Development, digital excellence and a major boost to innovation output

Town Investment Plan Schemes are needed to:

• Address Crawley’s housing need of an additional 11,280 homes with “no” land. This has been calculated as part of the process of revising the borough’s Local Plan. However, the borough only has the land availability to accommodate 5,355 of those dwellings and Crawley town centre, with space allocated for 3,000 homes, is the biggest contributor. It is essential therefore that action is taken to fast track build out of this new neighbourhood
• Unlock Crawley’s dormant commercial space development. Manor Royal has more than four hectares of land that has been granted planning permission for new commercial space but has not been built out
• Enable a significant boost to local innovation output. Coast to Capital Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) economic profiling reveals that Crawley and the Gatwick Diamond have low levels of innovation output compared to a range of “competitor” areas in the south east
• Unlock university provision in Crawley and Gatwick Diamond
• Tackle stubbornly high carbon emissions, rising in the transport sector
• Unlock the infrastructure interventions needed to create a “green” economy, drive net zero carbon emissions and ensure Crawley is at the vanguard of full fibre digital take up

• The £73 million Crawley Growth Programme infrastructure investment includes new small business space and upgrades to: town centre public realm; bus infrastructure; cycle routes in Manor Royal and the town centre; pedestrian crossings; Three Bridges Station and its inter-modal connectivity
• Major investment in gigabit broadband and sustainable transport; a new Crawley Train Station; major upgrade to Gatwick Airport train station; electric vehicle charging infrastructure; £27 million investment in full fibre broadband
• A 3,000 home town centre neighbourhood in development
• Dynamic Grade A commercial space investment, including a 21st century commercial Eastern Gateway in Crawley town centre
• The council is leading by example, building a new Town Hall, 273 flats and 78,000 square feet of Grade A commercial space

The design of a new cultural quarter in the town centre will map out the prospective location of new cultural and events venues and produce associated site designs and an overall delivery plan, which will include how the town centre's existing leisure, culture and evening economy provision will be enhanced and expanded. This will unlock the development and delivery of a "pop up" programme of cultural, arts and creative industry interventions to help pump prime the development of the cultural quarter. This will involve stakeholders from the town centre's cultural and leisure economy.

Public realm upgrades will be made via delivery of a programme of business environment upgrades and modernisation, including micro- park upgrades, creating a network of walking trails linking all the micro-parks to provide a significant boost to amenity in the Business District. Upgrades will also be made to bus waiting areas from the Crawley Growth Programme to enhance the visual look and feel of the Business District, creating a 21st century high quality business park.

To achieve net zero carbon by 2050, the design, establishment and delivery of a local grants programme will be needed to help deliver sustainable homes. This will also stimulate business, economic activity and job creation in green construction

Build and establish Crawley's first Fusion Centre in Manor Royal, specialising in advanced engineering and digital tech. Our project will establish the Gatwick Diamond's first Innovation Centre in the heart of Crawley's Manor Royal Business District, unlocking prized, high value jobs to boost the local economy and serving Crawley’s advanced engineering business cluster to help safeguard its huge contribution to the town’s economic output and productivity.

Design and enable a new "commercial eastern gateway" in Crawley town centre as a hub for professional services business. Crawley's workforce lags behind significantly in regard to the proportion with Level 4 qualifications and above, symptomatic of the absence of new FE skills training infrastructure and a university presence in the area and the surrounding Gatwick Diamond sub-region. This project would see the establishment of a new further education (FE) skills training infrastructure and a university presence in Crawley with the potential to work closely with the Institute of Technology programme from the UK government.

Spilt across two projects, one will focus on creating a programme of business infrastructure grants to attract "green" technology and construction businesses to take up premises in Manor Royal and help Crawley business adopt "sustainable energy" provision with the creation of "Re-energise" Management Company in Manor Royal. The second project will focus on the delivery of "green construction" Crawley workforce skills training. The development and provision of a programme of green construction skills, available to Crawley residents, particularly those being made redundant, is absolutely critical to the ability for the borough to develop a "green construction" business base and diversity into a green economy.

• Transform Crawley Bus Station and deliver a state-of-the-art transport interchange in the heart of Crawley town centre.
• Design and develop new "arterial" cycle routes which establish off-road segregated cycle connections between Gatwick Airport, Manor
• Royal, the town centre and key neighbourhoods, in order to maximise "active commuting"
• A programme of incentives for Manor Royal businesses and business premises to connect to the new full fibre being installed, helping to establish Manor Royal as a "gigabit" Business Park
• Create a "virtual village" by enabling a platform of digital applications to digitally connect the town centre's new apartments, retailers, "evening economy", gyms, coffee shops, cultural venues, railway and bus stations and other amenities