DEBATE
DEVELOPMENT IN ASSOCIATION WITH: A CHANGE OF PLAN NEEDED
We brought our expert panel of property professionals together at Mytton Fold, with the help of Wildbrook CRE, to examine the challenges facing developers and development in Lancashire today and how they can be overcome
PRESENT: Richard Slater - Lancashire Business View (Chair) Ian Liddle - Farleys Tracy Clavell-Bate - Barnfield
Tom Hargreaves - AG Built Environment Consultancy Neil Higson - Wildbrook CRE Paul Walton - PWA Planning
What is getting in the way of development?
KH: Development has never been easy in commercial property. A combination of challenges comes down to the bottom line: is it viable, is it deliverable?
You’ve got a plan, a vision, some land, a scheme everyone thinks is brilliant. You get planning sorted, which can take a bit of time. Then you go out to get the scheme costed and the inflationary costs in construction make it hard.
With interest rates increasing, finance costs are considerably more, which has an impact on values. Developers want to make a return as well as reinvest, so it doesn’t always stack up.
In terms of land values, some landowners are still of the view land is worth what it was 12 or 18 months ago, and unfortunately that has changed.
So that combination makes it difficult. However, development is something that has always taken a long time, and particularly regeneration projects where ten to 15 years is not uncommon.
You’ve just got to stick with it, be patient and
work through it, and the key solution to how you deliver it, is really working in partnership. Some of the best examples are when the private and public sector are working together.
TCB: The land values aren’t there. At the end of the day, land is only worth what somebody is prepared to pay for it.
There is also the amount of time it takes to get things on the ground in construction. From buying the land, through the planning process, through finding and securing tenants, to getting them on site, it’s a long process.
There’s a lot of potential confusion in the planning system over new things coming through such as Bio Net Gain (BNG), which is all to do with ecology credits.
NW: Government is consistently tinkering with things and that doesn’t help anyone. On BNG, government still hasn’t got the legislation in place to guide us, and it’s coming in January.
We need a simpler process for development plans to come forward because they shouldn’t take eight years. You want certainty in a system as developers.
You want to know you’re going to get planning permission; you want to know the costs for that,
Jamie Grimshaw - Together Money Karen Hirst - Maple Grove Developments Neil Watson - Pendle Council
you want to know what contributions you have to make, and we’re constantly getting tinkering in that process.
We’ve got BNG coming in, community infrastructure evidence is going to come forward and nobody knows how it’s going to work.
What we also need is a national policy that recognises that the north and some of the values that we have here are different than what we have in the south. We need a planning system which changes and is reflective of different spatial characteristics across the country.
PW: The planning process is challenging in the extreme. That is not a criticism of local authorities. They’re suffering from the political involvement that government sets itself. It sets out to have these grand ideas, but ultimately, they all tend to flounder as things go along, so that has been the challenge and it continues to be the challenge today.
Being able to resource a properly funded planning service, which is able to respond quickly to the development industry’s needs, is one of the biggest challenges we have at the moment.
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