Good morning,
Conservative Party election strategists have told MPs in key marginal seats to stop using the phrase “levelling up” because “no one knows what it means”. Instead, phrases including “stepping up”, “gauging up” and “enhancing communities” are deemed to be less nebulous and more appealing to voters.
Shadow levelling up secretary Lisa Nandy has said she would scrap the government’s levelling up “missions”, which she says are too vague to have any merit or meaning. “It is fundamentally dishonest to introduce measures of success without definition, ambition, clarity or even the faintest idea of how you meet them,” she told the Institute for Government.
Meanwhile, the assets of Britishvolt, including the Blythe site where its £3.8bn gigafactory was to built, could be put up for sale following its collapse into administration. EY was appointed last night as administrator to Britishvolt. The UK battery start-up had also partnered with Prologis to develop at £200m battery scale-up facility at its Prologis Park Hams Hall, to the north-east of Birmingham.
The London Legacy Development Corporation is seeking a joint venture development partner to deliver Pudding Mill Lane, the last major development site on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The site of the £675m project totals 12.6 acres, and has outline planning for 948 homes and a minimum of 323,000 sq ft of commercial space.
And Socius and the railway pension scheme Railpen have formed a joint venture to develop Botanic Place, a £500m, 800,000 sq ft office scheme in Cambridge.
Life Science REIT plans to complete a further 262,000 sq ft at Oxford Technology Park. The REIT has just signed quantum computing start-up Oxford Ionics for Building One.
Vistry’s private forward sales have slumped by £300m, but partnerships with housing associations have buoyed the business.
Landlords of Paperchase face more losses as the stationer considers its second pre-pack administration in two years.
And corporate insolvencies rose sharply in England and Wales in December, to 76% higher than before the pandemic.
Wild camping has been banned on Dartmoor, following a case taken against the national park by a hedge fund manager landowner. But a local MP who received a donation from him has refused to comment on the case.
“I want it to feel like a garden, or a spaceship.” A school in Spain shows why, just maybe, we should let our children design our buildings.
And finally, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities yesterday released a volley of what, at first glance, appeared to be new announcements for the £2.1bn second round of Levelling Up funding. No fewer than 128 releases, each detailing the money dished out to worthy regeneration projects across the UK, each bearing that day’s date, each appearing, for all the world, like a “new thing”. Had the long-awaited day finally come? After all, the second round allocations were supposed to have been announced in October, but apparently “the whole Liz Truss thing” got in the way. Then the latest prime minister, Rishi Sunak, promised they would be announced “by the end of the year”. And after being mired in bureaucracy, councils were told in December not to expect any news until this month. So, was the deluge of 128 “announcements” issued by the department the prophesied second coming? Nope. Turns out they were were merely “case studies” from the previous round of funding. The one that was announced in October 2021. And the second round? Still no news.
