The private sector is preparing to salvage Royal William Yard, flagship of Plymouth UDC, which so far has soaked up millions in taxpayers’ money. Tony Sutton goes on board.
Next Tuesday, March 31, marks the end of the remaining urban development corporations. Created by the Thatcher government in the 1980s, UDCs were an attempt to regenerate derelict urban areas by transferring planning power and funds to an appointed quango. All involved large-scale public funding of land reclamation and infrastructure.
Of those that expire next week, Plymouth Development Corporation, designated in 1993, will probably be the one remembered most, but for all the wrong reasons.
It shot to public notice in 1995 when its chief executive, John Collinson, was forced to resign for improper use of corporation money for foreign trips. A subsequent report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee revealed lax budgetary control with a “high level of duplicate payments” to consultants and “acceptance of insufficiently specific invoices” from them.
Taxpayers may also question the amount of public money that has been channelled into this small area of the city. After five years of regeneration work, PDC has spent £50m of public money to create 115 permanent jobs. That is around £500,000 for each job created or nearly £620,000 per job if private-sector investment is included.
Under its new management, the corporation has earned praise for the way it has handled regeneration of two of its sites, Mountbatten and Mount Wise, which are virtually complete. But its regeneration record is blighted by the lack of progress on its flagship site, Royal William Yard – 7.7ha (19 acres) of densely developed, historic buildings totalling 46.450m2 (500,000 sq ft) that can hardly be altered, on a peninsula accessed by narrow roads in a built-up, depressed area: a developer’s nightmare.
“You can’t blame the corporation. They were dealt a very difficult hand,” says Steve Lobb, director of Chesterton’s Plymouth office.
The development task now passes to English Partnerships, which will buy the site for £1 in the knowledge that the yard has a deficit value, according to government-appointed agents, of £24m.
Geoff Timbrell, who replaced Collinson as PDC’s chief executive, is optimistic that Royal William Yard will be regenerated by Christmas. He is pinning his hopes on preferred developer MEPC negotiating a development agreement with English Partnerships. But even if MEPC’s scheme reaches the starting block, it is still going to require a further £20m of public money to restore the fabric of Royal William Yard’s buildings, which are classed as “ancient scheduled monuments”.
The developer is proposing an 11,148m2 (120,000 sq ft) factory outlet centre, pubs, restaurants, housing, offices and a hotel. MEPC’s contribution will be £40m, although that may now change with EP in the driving seat.
Timbrell reckons that the shopping centre, which is expected to provide 500 jobs, will redress the cost per job to £211,000. Total investment – both public and private – for the three sites would climb to £130m, producing about 615 permanent jobs.
Some local developers and agents remain highly sceptical that MEPC can solve the access problems. “If the scheme is going to add 3m visitors a year to what Plymouth already has, I fail to see how they are going to be accommodated in 1,500 car spaces, half of which are remote from the site anyway,” says Lobb.
“And I fail to see how the people are going to get to those car parks using the existing road infrastructure.”
He says that the public money spent on Royal William Yard would have attracted far more private-sector funds and provided more widespread benefits to Plymouth if it had been aimed at the city centre. “But that sort of thing was never on the agenda,” he comments.
Plymouth Development Corporation appears to have been generated from a visit to the yard in the mid-1980s by then Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine. As he was being shown around the site by flag officer Rear Admiral Gerkin, he is said to have remarked to Gerkin: “This should be handed over to the private sector for development.”
In the late 1980s, developer Avatar put forward an ambitious “Covent Garden”-style development of the two MOD sites Royal William Yard and South Yard. But the land was not released, so Avatar’s scheme was never tested.
Plymouth city council’s high-profile planning and development director, Chris Shepley, campaigned hard for the release of MOD land. At the time, Plymouth was running out of employment land. More than 30,000 jobs had been lost by cutbacks in the Royal Navy Docks and unemployment was high. “The MOD has shed jobs, now it must shed land,” was Plymouth city council’s cry.
Two consultants’ reports commissioned by the MOD on the commercial viability of developing Royal William Yard were emphatic: it couldn’t be done. However, in 1993, with Heseltine having assumed the office of Environment Secretary, the UDC concept was pushed through, with Gerkin as chairman of the corporation.
Transferring the land suited the MOD. Royal William Yard’s architecturally acclaimed buildings had not been adequately maintained and the cost of repairing the fabric was £20m-£30m.
Shepley was aware of the access problems, but he believed they could be solved by constructing a £12m causeway to the yard. For a UDC with limited life and funds, however, that was never a viable proposition.
The PDC’s solution was to convert the existing roads into a one-way system. Timbrell maintains that Royal William Yard is part of a package of Plymouth’s attractions that will spread tourist traffic.
Ken Johnson, who takes over next week as EP’s project manager, says that he will be taking a fresh look at access.
He says that his first task will be to prepare the site’s masterplan, which he expects to have ready in three months’ time. “The factory outlet centre fits the bill. The trick is going to be adding the other uses to the site,” he explains.
A procession of developers has tried to produce schemes. Tarmac was the first. It dropped out and London & Easter then spent a couple of years with the corporation attempting to advance a £70m mixed development of housing, retail, offices and commercial leisure. Peaston followed with ideas for speciality shopping coupled with a historically based leisure project. McAlpine also showed an interest.
“All these schemes failed because they did not have a sustainable commercial core,” says Colin Brooks, MEPC’s development manager, who is now promoting the project.
“The factory outlet shopping centre gives our scheme that sustainable commercial core,” he adds.
Brooks believes the scheme will work if MEPC, working with English Partnerships, can marry that commercial core with a development package that brings the whole yard under “one umbrella” comprising perhaps a heritage centre, a hotel and housing.
He expects the centre to attract at least 3m visitors a year, the number MEPC gets at its Street scheme in Somerset. For Royal William Yard, that is a daily flow of 8,200 people from a 750-space car park and a similarly sized park and ride.
Timbrell defends his record by saying that the corporation has had a clear run on the yard only for the past 18 months. A public inquiry into access improvements took 18 months for a decision and, of the 232 planning applications processed by the corporation, almost 40% had to be referred to the Secretary of State, adding further delays to the process.
“Development of Royal William Yard has to be done by the big-bang approach: all at once and not piecemeal,” he says.
If the joint venture of MEPC and English Partnerships does complete this scheme, it will mean that more than £40m of public money has been spent on creating a factory outlet shopping centre for Plymouth – hardly the most appropriate use of public funds.
