A group of Liverpool business people have gone to the High Court to fight a £35m redevelopment of the Lime Street Station site in
Michael and Anis McCabe and two others are challenging the confirmation by the secretary of state for communities and local government, in October 2006, of English Partnerships’ order that their shops should be compulsory purchased to make way for a 27-storey tower by Liverpool-based developer Iliad.
After demolition of the current 13-storey tower, the new tower should provide 16,000 sq ft of offices, 11,000 sq ft of retail and 152 residential units on 22 storeys covering 88,000 sq ft.
As well as the tower, the
This is the second challenge to English Partnerships use of its statutory powers to achieve urban development.
In November 2006, Liverpool grandmother Elizabeth Pascoe succeeded in preventing the demolition of her home and 500 others to make way for a £60m development in
In that case, Forbes J said that the secretary of state had exceeded his power by engaging in an “impermissible dilution” of the requirements that had to be satisfied before the land could be compulsorily purchased.
He said that by considering the land to be “predominantly underused or ineffectively used”, he had applied a less stringent test than the statutory requirement that the land should be “underused or ineffectively used”.
The McCabe’s barrister, Katherine Olley, told the court that the secretary of state had “fallen into the same error as in Pascoe in endorsing English Partnerships’ attempt to acquire property on the basis that it is within an area which is not as a whole vacant, underused or ineffectively used (albeit that it may be predominantly so).”
High Court judge Goldring J has reserved judgment until a later date.
