Perhaps a signal the UK development sector is starting to turn a corner is when some of the totemic planning failures of the last cycle seek a reboot. This week a third application for the Westferry Printworks will be heard by Tower Hamlets with strong indications it would find the new scheme acceptable. Meanwhile, earlier in the summer, Knight Frank has dusted off Anglia Square following Western Homes’s decision to withdraw and relaunched it to the market. Are these the green shoots we have all been waiting for?
The controversial Westferry application is a sorry tale. Then Secretary of State Robert Jenrick and now Tory leadership hopeful had intervened to approve the scheme only for it to emerge he had sat next to the site’s billionaire owner Richard Desmond at a Tory fundraiser. After a humiliating U-turn the Government rejected it identifying 22 breaches of planning policy. At the time it was difficult not to conclude the shambles had been brought about by deep dysfunction between the various political tiers of the planning polity. It led to the eventual end of Jenrick as Secretary of State and with him the ambitious planning reforms he had been promoting.
Anglia Square was another major scheme mauled in the jaws of planning polity dysfunction. The proposal for over 1,000 homes in Norwich was approved in 2018 only to be called in by Jenrick and eventually rejected. Despite a revised proposal winning support, the time it took for an eventual green light meant the scheme economics endured a wave of post pandemic cost inflation along with other material regulatory changes which have rocked the sector. Western Homes bowed out with its chairman citing the failure of the Tory Government as a chief reason for the termination of their interest.
The new Government is talking positively about major development. Look no further than Westferry and Anglia Square for two early tests. These mini new towns are exactly the kind of opportunities they must support if their rhetoric is to become reality.
Both opportunities involve huge injections of private capital. More than the public purse has to offer. The Government should recognise and applaud this within limits rather than maul and bog down such ventures in appeals and overturns as what afflicted the previous administration. Let’s hope with a change of leadership at the top we will see these projects come forward over the next cycle and deliver the housing and renewal they have promised.
