At a recent event hosted by Amodal at British Land’s Canada Water Project Office, senior professionals working across development, building safety, and construction insurance gathered to examine what masterplan delivery actually looks like in practice.
The result was a candid conversation about information management, regulatory change, and the cultural shifts that major developments can no longer afford to ignore.
Our thanks to our speakers Michael Delfs, Canada Water; Will Freeman, Enframe Consulting; Libby Bado, Lockton; and Dr. Bola Abisogun who joined us for the panel discussions.
Michael Delfs, Project Director of Canada Water, opened with a first-hand account of the Canada Water Masterplan: 53 acres in Central London, 13 development zones, 40 building plots, over 100 infrastructure projects, and 6 to 7 million square feet of mixed-use development. By any measure, an extraordinary undertaking.
What a map cannot convey, he argued, is the relentless complexity of fitting the pieces together.
“All of the things you need to do on a single building that are extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming and expensive, you have to do on a masterplan, but you have to do it several hundred times. And all of those things need to connect to one another.”
That complexity is compounded by the market environment. Canada Water began around 2015, when capital was abundant and conditions were favourable. COVID, a subsequent recession, and persistently elevated costs and financing rates have fundamentally altered the landscape. Delivering at this scale now requires being, as Michael put it, “very smart, very lean, and very clever” about how you take the project forward.
The opportunity, though, remains exceptional. What large-scale masterplans offer that single buildings cannot is the ability to create a location premium rather than simply capture one. Whether people want to live, work, and spend time in a neighbourhood is the foundation on which everything else rests, and engineering that at pace, rather than over centuries, is one of the defining challenges of the discipline.
Managing this scale of development also demands a fundamentally different approach to information. Dozens of concurrent projects, each with its own design development, contractor relationships, and regulatory requirements, generate an exponential volume of unstructured data. Michael was explicit about what he values in an information management partner: a willingness to engage with the actual, on-the-ground complexity rather than defaulting to generalised frameworks.
Artificial intelligence is already proving transformative here by compressing processes that previously took months of administrative effort into hours, and making vast document estates genuinely navigable.
Will Freeman, Director of Enframe Consulting and a government-appointed board member of the Architects Registration Board, offered a frank assessment of where the industry stands with the Building Safety Act.
Before the Act, the RIBA Plan of Work provided a shared framework for project progression. In practice, he said, “those lines were becoming blurred and fudged, and people weren’t really following what was set out in the guidance.” The Act has reimposed rigour — not always directly, but by forcing earlier, more controlled thinking about information flow and decision-making.
The practical implications for masterplan delivery are significant. Three mandatory compliance gateways now govern project progress, with Gateway 1 placing fire safety at the centre of the planning stage. Dutyholder roles carry statutory weight. And the “golden thread” of structured, auditable information is a legal requirement, not a best practice recommendation. Providing false or misleading safety information is now a criminal offence.
The cultural gap remains a concern. Clients and contractors are still, in some cases, operating with pre-Act processes. For masterplan projects, where buildings, dutyholder relationships, and regulatory interactions multiply across decades, that gap creates serious exposure. The goal, as Will framed it, is buildings that are “compliant, safe, and good places for people to live and work.” Getting the information architecture right from the outset is what makes that possible.
Libby Bado, Vice President at Lockton, made the commercial stakes of information quality concrete.
“Underwriting for project insurances is really, really heavily information driven,” she said. “The more comprehensive information that you give, the better terms and the better outcomes you get from the market.”
Her core message was about timing. “I think it’s key to think about the insurability of a project around the same time as thinking about the design or the funding. If you have difficulty getting insurers, that can cause problems with getting funding for a project.”
The conversation with a broker should begin at planning stages — not once the design is substantially resolved. Early engagement surfaces potential issues before they become expensive constraints, and provides indicative pricing that avoids late-stage budget surprises.
Underwriter scrutiny remains high despite a softening market, particularly around escape of water, existing structures, and modern construction methods. Delays in providing the right documentation result directly in delayed quotes, restricted coverage, and lost capacity.
Being, as Libby put it, “a willing participant in the process” — presenting risk clearly, completely, and proactively — is what separates projects that secure strong terms from those that do not.
The event closed with a panel discussion moderated by Amodal CEO Stuart Bell, with an opening contribution from Dr. Bola Abisogun of the Digital Twin Skills Academy.
Dr. Bola’s framing was direct: every project requires people, finance, and insurance. Insurance is increasingly the primary mechanism for de-risking the behaviours — incompetence, poor governance, inadequate accountability — that have historically plagued the sector. And solving those problems requires bringing in a generation of practitioners who are natively comfortable with technology and with the transparency it enables.
The discussion of digital twins drew out one of the event’s sharpest observations. Adoption remains slow, and the reason is not technical — it is that clients are regularly asked to fund expensive models without a clear understanding of what those models are for. The panel was unambiguous: the right starting point is always the use case. What decision do you need the twin to support? What outcome are you trying to achieve? Build from that, rather than creating capability in the hope that a purpose will follow.
The Building Safety Act discussion reinforced Will Freeman’s earlier point about the accountability gap. The legislation has changed the rules; the culture has not yet caught up. Fragmented processes, siloed information, and a residual tendency to treat compliance as a documentation exercise rather than a substantive responsibility are all still present in the industry. The regulatory consequences for getting that wrong are now severe.
Across every presentation, the same principle recurred: information management is a strategic function, not an administrative one. The Building Safety Act demands a structured golden thread. Insurers and funders require comprehensive, well-organised project data as a condition of coverage and financing. And a tighter market means the cost of poor information management is higher than it has been for a generation.
The practitioners in the room were not presenting polished success stories. They were sharing hard-won lessons about what genuinely makes the difference at scale.
This article draws on presentations from the Amodal event, Masterplan Delivery Under the Spotlight, featuring Michael Delfs of British Land, Will Freeman of Enframe Consulting, Libby Bado of Lockton and Dr. Bola Abisogun of the Digital Twin Skills Academy.
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