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Budget 2012 - what's it mean for the regions

By Nadia Elghamry on March 21, 2012 2:15 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
5296559285_970a504244.jpgGeorge Osborne opened up his piggy bank this lunchtime. Heaving the national level stuff to one side here's what Osborne's budget will mean for the regions:

  • Ten cities to become "super connected cities" as part of a £100m investment. Belfast, Bradford, Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, London, Manchester and Newcastle will benefit from the fund.

  • A new enterprise zone in Deeside, north Wales appears to have been a bit of a fluff up for the Chancellor as the zone was announced by the welsh assembly government 6 months ago. But others offering "enhanced capital allowances" for businesses in Scotland: Dundee, Irvine and Nigg as well as Northern Ireland were also announced.  


  • Lord Heseltine will conduct a review into how goverment departments can encourage private sector growth in the regions. Heseltine is already chairman of the regional growth fund. He will report back to government in the autumn

  • And extra £270m for the Growth places fund
Picture by Pasukaru76

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Swansea swaps eyesore for car park - is this progress?

By Stacey Meadwell on January 11, 2012 3:39 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Demolition.jpgDTZ issued a press release yesterday (only a month after the event) to say that it has advised Swansea City council, along with the Welsh Government, in buying the virtually empty St David's Shopping centre in the city from Threadneedle. On the surface it looks like good news, a step towards the city's long-planned, retail and residential-led regeneration in which the St David's centre apparently is 'a key part'.

OK so the council has recognised that public sector intervention is needed but it is only going as far as demolishing the building and creating a surface car park "until market conditions improve". Where have we heard that before? The kissing towers site in Leeds springs to mind, that 'temporary' car park has been around for 10 years or more. 

Swansea's regeneration plans are grand covering 32 acres with up to 600,000 sq ft of retail and 1,000 homes. Hammerson and then JV partner Urban Splash, which subsequently dropped out, drafted a masterplan back in 2008 (£) for what is seen as a 10 year project.

However back in the Autumn Gareth Hooper of DPP planning consultants said in our Wales Focus: "Swansea had even more ambitious plans than Newport and there is no way those are going to come forward in the current climate. It seems Swansea is still waiting for the market to improve, whereas Newport is being realistic about what it can achieve."

Newport has learnt the hard way about trying to get ambitious retail-led regeneration plans off the ground is Swansea going to do the same?

Well noises from the council back in November imply not.  They admitted the plans were being revisited in light of the tough economic conditions but the 'key principles of the scheme remain the same'.

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Photo by Ell Brown on Flickr

Croydon's conundrum after Nestle takes a break

By Nadia Elghamry on January 5, 2012 1:22 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Thumbnail image for kit kat.jpgSo it's official. Nestle will leave Croydon. The town's biggest and highest profile employer is heading to Crawley. 

The Kit Kat manufacturer leaves in its wake 120,000 sq ft of secondary office space and a massive dent in the Surrey town's confidence. 

Croydon council knew that the town's office stock was ageing and old and offered few options for the conglomerate.  In fact the council says around a third of the town's stock needs razing. It has been keen to get this outdated stock back into its own hands. Nestle leaving probably wasn't quite what it had in mind. 

It has long since feared Nestle would up sticks and go and it's something we have written about extensively in the past. Jon Rouse, the incredibly well respected chief executive at Croydon council, was measured when asked about Nestle's possible departure back in September last year. He said: "Nestlé is important for the borough and we want them to stay. But all global businesses are footloose and you cannot tie your economic policy to one company."

The council can't be accused of thinking small. It even mulled a land acquisition fund in a slash and burn move to stimulate regeneration and rents by removing the drag of the outdated stock. That would be quite ballsy but may be exactly the sort of move the town now needs. 

Continue reading Croydon's conundrum after Nestle takes a break.


Guest post: Onus on developers to stop NI Assembly wrapping buildings in cotton wool

By Nadia Elghamry on November 28, 2011 1:25 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Thumbnail image for Angela Dunbar Turley Associates.jpg
Angela Dunbar is an associate director in the Belfast office of planning and urban design consultancy Turley Associates.  adunbar@turleyassociates.co.uk

The plight of heritage property in Northern Ireland  made headlines over recent months following a spate of suspected arson attacks on protected properties and deliberate damage from rogue developers.  So worried is the Northern Ireland government that its Environment Minister, Alex Attwood, has held two heritage crime summits to try and resolve the problems.  Tough sanctions are proposed.

The planning regime in the province is currently under reform, with a shift in power from central to local government that should deliver more focused and timely decisions on heritage regeneration projects.  While we await the transfer of power this should not however deter developers from bringing forward schemes involving protected property; local authorities recognise that often the best way to secure the long term future of heritage assets is to find economically viable new uses.

The onus is on developers to bring forward schemes that seek to make the most of our heritage assets.  The planning regime provides the necessary checks and balances of protection.


Continue reading Guest post: Onus on developers to stop NI Assembly wrapping buildings in cotton wool.


Analysis: The fallout after Tithebarn, Preston loses John Lewis

By Nadia Elghamry on November 3, 2011 9:40 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Thumbnail image for fightaf402622ef.jpgThe news this morning that John Lewis had pulled out of £700m Tithebarn (£) regeneration scheme in Preston was a shock.

Battered and bruised, the scheme has had anything but an easy ride but is the loss of John Lewis the final blow? Developers Lend Lease are far from giving up the fight and says it will work with the council on a scaled down version of the 1.5m sq ft scheme - something that probably should have been done a while ago given the economic climate. 

More worrying now for Tithebarn is the fallout from other retailers. Many will have come in off the back of the John Lewis signing, how many will now stay without the pull of the partnership.

It also raises questions over John Lewis signings in other major developments. It's worth noting that nothing at all official has ever been hinted at and John Lewis have always expressed nothing less than their utmost commitment to other developments. But agents in Leeds have long speculated about when the partnership reaches the long-stop clause on its agreement with Hammerson  at the Eastgate Quarter. 

Add in its adventure in Croydon which ended in March 2010 when the council pulled the plug on a major retail development at Park Place anchored by John Lewis and you could understand why the retailer might be getting a bit cheesed off. 

With the partnership increasingly signing up for mini-department stores (think York's announcement yesterday) the question is how many more mega-developments will it get fed up waiting for. 

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Picture by KellBailey on Flickr

Basing View - Muse wins but can it make the sums stack up?

By Nadia Elghamry on October 26, 2011 2:39 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
lego blocks.jpgMuse is the winner at Basing View. The news came through today that it will partner Basingstoke and Deane borough council on £200m worth of regeneration to build 700,000 sq ft of offices, piping John Laing to the post.

So the building blocks are in place but there are a couple of sticking points. 

Number one is the council's freehold interest in the site. Many agents felt that it would be wishful thinking to imagine a developer will come and build at Basing View without being able to offer it the freehold. 

A quick phone call to the council and it seems it will retain the freehold and will offer Muse a long leasehold. The actual length hasn't been decided but it will be on an institutional basis probably around 125-150 years.

That will be some comfort to Muse but also to residents - Basingstoke council is, perhaps surprisingly, the fifth-largest local authority landlord in the country, and earns around £2m pa in rent from its various long-leaseholds. 

 
Number two is the battered and bruised office market. The industry is happy that it's sensibly decided on prelets rather than any silly stipulation to make the developer build speculatively. Had it not it would probably have sent most developers running for the hills, especially given the precarious nature of Basingstoke's office market - something we analysed in the Hants and Dorset Focus in the magazine last week (£). 

But for Muse to make a good stab at this, it will need to tackle both getting a tenant through the door at the same time as upping headline rents that at £23 per sq ft barely make development stack up.

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Lego blocks picture from oskay on Flickr

The battle for Newport begins - Admiral leads the charge

By Nadia Elghamry on October 17, 2011 12:00 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
3596943941_0641850b6d.jpgbus station entrance, Newport.JPG













Spot the difference? No me either, well not much. The picture above on the left is the entrance to Newport bus station back in June 2009, the other was taken last week. It was due to be razed last year to make way for Modus'  Friar's Walk development which, sadly is no more. Queensberry has since signed up to the retail scheme.

Newport has been the butt of a few jokes (one agent warned about going to the city after dark) but there's a growing swell of feeling amongst the South Wales business community that the punch line is no longer funny. There's a feeling that Newport has been really quite hard done by.

Unlike Swansea it missed out on grant assistance, it had appallingly bad luck in that its main show-stopping piece of development, Modus' Friars Walk and City Spires, went for funding just as bank lending all but disappeared. And it just about struggled with what it had and made a success of hosting the Ryder Cup last year. 

Admiral Insurance, one of Wales' biggest employers and certainly one of its biggest growers, is leading a charge to change this. Head of property Huw Llewellyn is due to meet Wales' feisty business minister Edwina Hart in a week or two. He's keen to talk to her about Admiral's continued growth, and how Wales could be made more attractive so that the insurer  continues to grow in the country. 

Getting regeneration back on track and getting people back into work will be part of that but Newport is high on that agenda. It's something Llewyln feels very strongly about. He wants to set up a partnership with the Welsh Government which would hopefully bring businesses and government closer together.

When an employer the size of Admiral starts to take an interest in these things, the Welsh Government is probably quite inclined to listen.

There will be much more on all these topics in our South Wales Focus features in the magazine on 12th November. 

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Newcastle and Gateshead's 1NG gets the chop: reaction

By Daniel Cunningham on September 29, 2011 1:50 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

axe.jpgToday's news that 1NG, the city development company for the Newcastle and Gateshead conurbation, has been axed by the two councils that fund it, has caused quite a stir.

The official word from Newcastle and Gateshead councils is that this is the launch of "new arrangements" to attract inward investments to the region, with 1NG's functions to be subsumed into the councils, the city promotional body NewcastleGateshead Initiative to begin a new drive to attract businesses, and 1NG chairman Lord Falconer to head a new Business Development Commission.

However, among Newcastle's there are clearly some concerns.Canvassing opinion today, some are putting a brave face on, with Sanderson Weatherall's Robert Patterson commenting: "I'm sure, going forward, the local authorities can achieve as much [as 1NG]."

But BNP Paribas Real Estate's Paul Nicholson said: "My concern is that another organisation with the North East's interests at heart has been shipped off."

 

Continue reading Newcastle and Gateshead's 1NG gets the chop: reaction.


Listen: Boris Johnson on Bromley's £1bn regeneration and Croydon's failure

By Nadia Elghamry on September 20, 2011 4:04 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
3287273707_6fd1b058bc.jpgBoris Johnson was in fine form at today's Invest in Bromley conference with everyone from Charles Darwin to Richmal Crompton getting a name check. The borough is launching a £1bn regeneration of the town centre (£) and was hoping to snag a few developers and investors. 

For Boris, Bromley's regeneration is undoubtedly pretty important. It's staunchly Conservative and helped elect him into power. I managed to grab him after his speech and asked him what he was doing to help the borough.  

The London mayor talked about the prospect of using TIFs to help unlock a DLR extension into Bromley North but interestingly he was also pretty candid about Croydon - which has been trying, and failing, to regenerate its own town centre for years. He said that some of the Croydon sites were "very difficult" and they were working with the council to unblock them. You can listen to the interview and Boris's speech in full in the following two podcasts. 


Continue reading Listen: Boris Johnson on Bromley's £1bn regeneration and Croydon's failure.


Pics and video: Manchester City FC's Etihad Campus proposals

By Daniel Cunningham on September 19, 2011 12:21 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks


The world's richest football club, Manchester City, has today submitted a planning application for 80-acres of land (£) surrounding its Etihad Stadium in east Manchester. As befits 'Moneybags' Manchester City, it will be building a mini-stadium to host youth team matches. No jumpers for goalposts at City then.

Above are some images and below is a fly-through video of the scheme.

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