Former deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine has backed Everton Football Club’s proposed move to a new dockland location and described it as a “golden opportunity to bring lasting change to the north of the city”.
The football club is on track to submit a planning application later this year for a circa £500m stadium on Bramley-Moore Dock, a largely abandoned piece of dockland in the north of Liverpool which forms part of Peel Land & Property’s Liverpool Waters site.
Heseltine said: “The involvement of a major football club like Everton as the spearhead of this development is hugely beneficial to the renewal process. This is not just for the immediate environments around the stadium facility but is of regional importance to Liverpool because of the wider economic impact.
“There’s no question that taking declining areas, or even semi-derelict areas like Liverpool’s north docks, and giving them a new lease of life, meets every test of regeneration. First of all, it reverses the decline; secondly, it uses brownfield sites as opposed to green sites; and it tends to create jobs and investment where people actually are – as opposed to people having to travel long distances. It can simply change the whole atmosphere of a place.”
Research by CBRE indicates the stadium project would lead to a £1bn boost to the local economy, the creation of 15,000 new jobs for local people (12,000 during the construction phase), and deliver an estimated additional 1.5m visitors to the city.
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