Sales of new cars in the all-important registration plate change month of March plummeted amid supply chain problems and rising living costs – but electric cars had their best month ever, with sales up 79% to almost 40,000.
The figures released today (5 April) by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders must further highlight the need for what would be the UK’s largest gigafactory, extending to almost 6m sq ft on the site of Coventry Airport.
Leading the property team working on the project is Mike Murray, a well-known figure in the West Midlands development sector and beyond, having led the delivery of St Modwen’s £1bn regeneration of the Longbridge car plant in Birmingham.
Murray joined Rigby Real Estate as commercial real estate director in May 2017, taking on responsibility for the strategy and growth of the group’s diverse portfolio and large-scale commercial development projects, including the gigafactory.
Murray says the initial idea for reinventing the airport site to form part of the region’s drive to decarbonise came from Coventry Council, which owns the freehold. Rigby Real Estate, the property division of Rigby Group of which Sir Peter Rigby is chairman, owns the long leasehold. West Midlands mayor Andy Street and the combined authority are wholeheartedly behind the project.
Rigby had already delivered the UK Battery Innovation Centre as part of a consortium on behalf of Warwick Manufacturing Group and Coventry City Council. “So we were already in that sort of battery world,” Murray says.
Planning permission was secured in mid-January and Murray says that discussions with potential occupiers from around the globe are ongoing.
“Everyone has slightly different models. So, this is why we got the planning, we can offer them this envelope. It’s for those occupiers to tell us what they want, because these projects are custom designed,” he says.
“We are saying to occupiers look, we have done all of the legwork – from securing the planning to working out how we build the roads and knowing how we can bring the power in. And basically, we are creating a plug-and-play option that they can come in and acquire part of the site or the full site and then just get on and deliver what they need to deliver.”
And this is much more than a property play, he explains.
“UK plc is competing against the whole of Europe [for battery manufacturers]. North America is a different market, so fundamentally we are looking at that European context when we are talking to an occupier. It’s not about whether they go to the north-east of the UK or the Midlands or elsewhere. It’s a decision about whether to go to Hungary, Spain, Scandinavia, Holland…,” Murray says.
Manufacturers want to know what the whole package looks like: location, scale, infrastructure, support from regional and national government and, crucially, the level of demand for batteries. Gigafactories are notoriously high energy consumers and discussions also extend to how manufacturers can ensure their own energy consumption is zero carbon.
“The whole idea is that we are trying to make this a soft landing for someone coming to the UK,” he says.
Given the UK government’s commitment to phase out the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles from 2030, demand for batteries in the UK is only set to rise further. At full production, the Coventry proposal could produce enough batteries to power 600,000 zero-emission cars a year.
The potential for the Coventry factory goes much wider still, Murray says, with new homes and industries of all types set to become major consumers of batteries as we transition to net zero.
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