Liverpool Mayor outlines Council’s ‘Ethical’ Housing Plans

Liverpool Council’s housing company aims to be on site with nearly 2000 homes within a year, the Mayor of Liverpool has said.

Speaking at our Liverpool event Mayor Joe Anderson told delegates that his authority’s new ethical housing company aims to deliver 10,000 homes on council and privately-owned land. The company, which will deliver a mix of low-cost accommodation including social housing, is already on site with two schemes and is planning more.

He said: “By this time next year, we hope to be on site with 16 schemes with about 1800 new houses.”

Anderson also revealed that he is keen to accelerate progress on the Liverpool Waters, Peel’s £5.5bn’s scheme opposite Albert Dock. The scheme, which is set to be bigger than the city’s showpiece Liverpool 1 development, would bring much needed revenue into the cash-strapped city’s coffers.

He said: “We want to speed it up. It’s a massive opportunity but we don’t want it to take 30 years, we want to reduce that to 12 to 15 years maximum.”

Mayor Joe Anderson also addressed infrastructure saying Liverpool had to be ‘radical’ in its approach to tackling the city centre’s traffic problems, such as by building a new monorail or putting roads underground in tunnels.

Anderson blamed the souring of relationships between Merseyside’s councils for the failure of Liverpool’s plans to create a tram network in the Noughties but said they had improved since the establishment of a city regional combined authority.

The Council is also set to make an announcement ‘shortly’ on its plans to create a tourism destination on the Festival Park, where work is already under way to decontaminate the 90-acre home of the 1980s garden expo.

Richard Mawdsley, Development Director of Peel’s Wirral Waters scheme in Birkenhead, said the company will be on site with nine projects within the next year.

The company has not been ‘sitting on its hands’ since securing planning consent in 2012 – for 2m sq ft of floorspace on the 700-acre site that it owns on the left bank of the River Mersey facing Liverpool city centre.

Work already carried out by the company included remediation of 60 acres and enabling infrastructure, including sustainable drainage and tree planting.

Peel are now anticipating a planning decision within the next month on No 1 Tower Road South. The 30,000 sq ft speculative office development, which aims to raise the bar in terms of the quality of office accommodation on the left bank of the Mersey, is being developed in a joint venture with Wirral Council.

They’ve also submitted plans to create a £3.5m centre for the Wirral’s artistic community at Egerton village, including a gallery, studio and managed workspace.

Peel also has plans for three housing projects on currently derelict land. These include the £90m plans to build 500 units, designed by architect Glen Howells in a joint venture with Wirral Council, which was approved by the local authority’s cabinet last month.

In addition, they have entered a JV with leading developer Urban Splash to deliver 350 units of the latter’s modular housing range which they’re looking to expand.

And Mawdsley said Peel should be on site in the early part of the New Year to develop its 1 m sq ft Waterside campus, which will be targeted at the off-site manufacturing requirements of companies working in the west coast’s booming energy sector.

He said the company also hopes to start on site early next year with £20m plans to turn the grade II listed Hydraulic Tower-into a Market Knowledge Hub. Peel has bid for support from the Community Infrastructure Fund for the project which it is working on with the Liverpool combined authority.

The entre development is supported by the Wirral Waters Investment Fund, a joint project with Wirral council which is one of only five tax increment financing schemes that have been set up across the UK.

Emma White, Programme Leader at Highways England, told the event that the agency is waiting to hear the outcome of a judicial review mounted by Sefton Council against its preferred bypass route for the A5036 link between the strategic road network and the Port of Liverpool.

Highways England wants to route the bypass via a local country park, but Sefton is mounting a legal challenge on the basis that the agency did not consult on routing it through a tunnel – which would cost an additional £1.5-2bn.

She said: “We don’t want to have to go back to government for more money.”

The project is designed to improve journey reliability and save time on the A5036, which is currently heavily congested with a high accident rate, White said: “We know stories of people living on the A5036 using the car to go to the corner shop because the road is so dangerous.”

And she said that the project developed by Highways England would improve conditions in the country park, parts of which are currently a no-go area even during the day.

Jan Bancroft, Managing Director of Assetz, told delegates that the profile of international investors seeking out opportunities in the buy-to-let market had changed ‘dramatically’ over recent years, with the Chinese ‘no longer’ the dominant group of overseas investors with ‘really strong’ demand from Israel and South Africa.

Colin Sinclair, Chief Executive of Knowledge Quarter Liverpool, said that Liverpool International College will be topped out in the new year and its new cancer centre will be operating within 12 months.