The Wizard from Oz: Dan Labbad on leading the Crown Estate

Meet Dan Labbad. He may not be a household name but, as chief executive of the Crown Estate, he is one of the most powerful men in the country. He runs an organisation that is one of the UK’s biggest landowners, with a £16bn portfolio of land and property. It owns vast swathes of countryside, not to mention a large slice of central London, including Regent Street, and Windsor Great Park. Oh, and the not-so-small matter of the entire seabed around England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. As if that wasn’t enough, the Crown Estate also has the rights to generate electricity from wind, waves and the tides on the continental shelf.

Finding himself at the heart of the British establishment is a world away from the working class part of Sydney where Labbad was brought up by his Italian mother and Egyptian father, whom he describes as “first generation Australians” and “great role models”.

Realising he needed to study “to have a future”, Labbad went to the University of Technology, Sydney, where he graduating with a first-class degree in civil engineering. This led to a career at global developer Lendlease – where he held a succession of senior roles before leaving in 2019. The 52-year-old joined the Crown Estate the following year. Leading the organisation during the pandemic that struck just weeks later was not his only challenge.

“I’d never been at the centre of British business and government like I have in this role, even though I’ve lived here for almost 20 years,” he says.

“One of the difficult things culturally, and I’ve learned this by working in businesses around the world, is that often when you speak a different language you’re more culturally consciously aware, because the language creates the juxtaposition. Whereas when you speak the same language, you subconsciously assume that, culturally, everything is the same when in fact it’s not.”

When he first started at the Crown Estate, Labbad encountered an unprecedented lack of dissent. “Everyone would agree more than ever before with what I was saying,” he says. Labbad decided to use humour to create an environment where people “feel comfortable throwing things back at me”.

He reflects: “There is no way in the world that a single individual, regardless of how good they may or may not be, can come up with a better set of longitudinal decisions than if you have the power of diversity around the table challenging things.”

Labbad is speaking to CSW as part of his bid to raise awareness of the work the Crown Estate is doing to create value for the UK.

“What we’re finding now is that, as we’re investing in talking about who we are and what we’re trying to do, it’s a much more efficient process getting to the real work,” he says. The Crown Estate’s focus is on supporting the UK’s drive towards net zero, as well as promoting biodiversity and nature recovery and wider economic growth.

The personable Labbad is all smiles, and so he should be. The past year has seen him steer the Crown Estate to a record profit of £442.6m, helped by six lucrative offshore wind farm leases agreed in January 2023. This is a 42% rise on the £312.7m profit made in 2021-22. And the Crown Estate is expected to rake in more than £1bn a year in profit in each of the next two years.

The organisation’s core duties are to increase the value of its portfolio and give its net profit to the Treasury, and its strategy is focused on creating financial, environmental and social value for the nation.

Offshore wind power has been one of the most successful aspects of this. The existing offshore wind energy capacity across the Crown Estate is enough to power almost 11 million homes. And new offshore wind farm leases sold by the Crown Estate last year have the potential to power more than seven million more homes.

Labbad is understandably proud of the Crown Estate’s contribution to the country’s net-zero ambitions. But he’s more guarded when asked whether he’s a monarchist and opts to talk about his pride in the shared “democratic values” of the UK and Australia. “What I’m patriotic to is the human condition,” he says. “And what I’m passionate about is, whilst I have some relative influence, using that influence to focus on things like the environment, which – yes – is a national challenge, but a national challenge in the context of an international humanitarian crisis”.

"Whilst I have some relative influence, I'm passionate about using it to focus on things like the environment, which is a national challenge, but in the context of an international humanitarian crisis"

Labbad has a strong sense of social justice which stems back to childhood memories of his father, who worked on a car production line and spoke with a thick Arabic accent, suffering discrimination. “I don’t stereotype culture,” he says. “People are not that different. People want to be respected. They want to be loved. They want hope. They want purpose.”

He stresses the importance of embracing the “beauty in difference” to help solve problems and “create workplaces where people belong.” Labbad is passionate about diversity and talks about his young daughter who, unlike her parents, speaks with a London accent. “She’s growing up in Hackney and watching her grow up in a place that’s so diverse is just wonderful. It’s one of the big reasons why we’re here,” he says.

Labbad adds with a grin: “She’s our cultural awareness programme. Because as she grows up through the system, we are learning to be really British.”

Hierarchy is another issue he feels strongly about. “I find it difficult to grasp the concept,” he says. “In Australian culture, people give less time to it.” This begs the question of what he makes of the civil service, which some would argue is the epitome of hierarchy.

He responds: “It’s not who’s around the table if we’re going to solve problems, but what’s on the table.”

Labbad recalls a recent exchange he had with a junior colleague where he told them: “I’ve got just as far to go as you do, because I might have experience, but the world’s changing fast and I’m trying to keep up with it. And what you don’t have in experience you have in fresh thinking. And that balances off and the world’s changing for you as much as it’s changing for me.”

The Australian expat recently started a second four-year term as chief executive. Clearly in it for the long haul, he says that his decision to stay on is partly due to the “fantastic” civil servants he works alongside. He professes to have nothing but admiration for the civil service. “It is full of incredibly smart people trying to do the right thing.” Labbad adds: “Everything we do is in partnership and one of our key partners is government… if I didn’t have complete admiration and faith in the British civil service, I don’t think that I’d be here.”

His new role has brought some unwelcome attention. Last year the Guardian reported that his remuneration was almost £1.6m in 2022-23, three times the £517,000 he received in 2019-20. CSW suggests the story did not frame things in the most flattering light. There’s a pause before Labbad drives off the question with a straight bat. “No,” he says.“But at the end of the day remuneration is a matter for the board.”

Another issue that has brought negative headlines in the past year is the windfall that King Charles will receive from a rise in the Sovereign Grant, which is linked to the profits made by the Crown Estate and paid out by the Treasury. The grant is set to rise from £86m this year to £125m in 2025-26.

Asked for his opinion, Labbad says he doesn’t have a personal view. “Our remit under the act is to deliver 100% of our net revenue surplus to the Treasury,” he says. “The Sovereign Grant is a separate arrangement altogether.”

And he is not fazed when quizzed over the minutiae of the 1961 Crown Estate Act. CSW cites Section 1.5, which states: “The validity of transactions entered into by the [Crown Estate] commissioners shall not be called into question or any suggestion of their not having acted in accordance with the provisions of this act, regulating the exercise of their power, or of their having otherwise acted in excess of their authority.”

If you cut through the legalese, isn’t this essentially saying: “We can do what we like and you’re not allowed to question us”? What does that mean for accountability?

Labbad calmly replies that the current legislation is fit for purpose, “broadly speaking”. He argues that what the act does “when you read it in its entirety, is give us a level of independence within a context and that context is ultimately set by parliament”.

In his view, the Crown Estate is “more transparent than most organisations” and “couldn’t be more accountable”.

When it comes to his personal outlook, he describes how his five-year-old daughter helps him to hold on to his “youthful idealism”. She is also his muse. “The world our kids are going to grow up in is going to be a lot more chaotic than the world we did. And I think they will hold us to account,” he says. “One of the things that I think about a lot is whether my daughter will say in 30 years from now, she feels that her mum and dad leant in and tried to do the right thing. And make a difference.”

Labbad confesses: “That drives me a lot because what I care about, probably more than anything else, is how she thinks about me down the track. It drives you to fight a little harder, and to push and get the little breakthroughs that, when you add them up, will make a little bit of a difference.”

He’s impatient to achieve more, and is excited at the prospect of the Crown Estate having greater freedom over where and how it makes investments, under government proposals announced during last year’s Autumn Statement.

Labbad sees the Crown Estate as a “catalyst” for outcomes on behalf of the country. “That means not doing what government does and not doing what the private sector does, but playing that role in the middle,” he says.

Referring to offshore wind, he reels off some of the challenges the Crown Estate faces. “How do we create and support the creation of a market?” he asks. “How do we make sure that market can remain sustainable?” Another balance to be struck will be making sure that the private sector is “empowering itself to deliver” and getting the right return on its capital for the risk it’s taking at the same time as “the taxpayer is also getting requisite value”, he says.

But what about concerns that the new seabed economy will be dominated by a small number of oil and gas companies? “We need the grassroots economy supporting this as much as we need the big players,” he says. “What we can’t afford to do is continue to roll out technologies on the seabed on a case-by-case basis.” A strategic approach is needed in the drive to achieve net-zero targets whilst protecting the environment and retaining “the international competitiveness of the sector for inward investment”. Labbad adds: “It is imperative that we think about the seabed holistically.”

For all his influence as a major player operating between the crown and state, Labbad is unlikely to let it go to his head. His family and friends keep him grounded. “My parents and my brothers are incredibly proud. But I’m just as proud of them as they are of me,” he says.“What’s more important to my family is the person that you are rather than what you do.”

He jokes that his daughter “thinks that my job is to press the button on each wind turbine every morning, and after lunch press the same buttons and turn them off.” And as for his friends: “If I thought I was half special because of what I did, I’d be dragged down in a second,” he says with a smile. 

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