Bargaining chip in a real-life game of Monopoly?

Apr 9 2008 by Bill Gleeson, Liverpool Daily Post

PEEL is threatening to switch its planned £5bn investment in its much-trumpeted Liverpool Waters skyscraper scheme to a similar development of tall buildings in Wirral.

The property group, which owns the Port of Liverpool and Liverpool John Lennon Airport, accuses Liverpool City Council of being slow to process the planning of its scheme on the Liverpool bank of the River Mersey.

Liverpool Waters is an intriguing proposal by Peel. The scale of the development appears far-fetched. It envisages up to 50,000 people living in and around Central Docks in a series of tall apartment buildings. That’s more than 10% of the city’s population. Surely that is unlikely, even in the long-term?

Yet far-fetched proposals are not Peel’s trademark. The property development firm has a tremendous track record of delivering its promises.

The latest noises to come out of the Peel Dome, at Manchester’s Trafford Centre, could be interpreted as the company playing one Merseyside council off against another, effectively saying: “Do things our way or we take our scheme to the other side of the river.”

If so, the Liverpool scheme may merely be a bargaining chip in Peel’s game of real-life Monopoly.

The problem with that analysis is that the Wirral scheme is equally extravagantly ambitious and implausible.

My hunch is the firm wants to develop its property on both sides of the river, but they know that developments on the scale of their current proposals will never come to pass. Instead, the huge scale of the proposals is some sort of elaborate negotiating ploy designed to achieve a smaller scale scheme, one which will be waved through the planning process because the related environmental and traffic impact studies will produce seemingly modest results compared to the original plan. Talking about firms playing councils off against one another, Stobart Group appears to be attempting to call Carlisle City Council’s bluff about its airport plans.

Stobart wants to build a massive haulage base at the city’s airport, but the council has attached conditions which the company says are too onerous. It goes on to threaten that, if the conditions are not revised, it will give up on Carlisle and move to Widnes, which has a centuries-old tradition of accepting almost anything.

It would, of course, be more good news for the area if Stobart was to leave its home town for our region, as such a move would create hundreds of jobs locally and gain for the region a forward looking firm.

Let’s hope its dispute with Carlisle isn’t settled amicably.

THE Mersey Partnership has won extra funding for its inward investment activities: nearly double the money, in fact.

However, even after the new funding is taken into account, Merseyside’s inward investment marketing resource is significantly smaller than rival regions. The West Midlands, for example, has 15 sales staff doing the necessary legwork to bring new jobs to their region, while we have three.

Merseyside’s local authorities need to ask themselves serious questions about their willingness to back TMP’s efforts. As things stand, they don’t appear to be doing enough.

Perhaps they are being tentative, because they don’t think TMP can do the job well. After all, the region has struggled to win its fair share of new jobs for many years. Hence, the comments of Liverpool City Council chief executive Colin Hilton, who says further new money will only be made available if the agency succeeds with the cash it has just been given. In the meantime, though, Birmingham is going to have things all its own way.