“2020 has without doubt been the toughest of my career,” admits Tony Reeves, chief executive of Liverpool City Council. “The challenges from all angles and in completely uncharted territory in lots of ways.”
For Reeves, a man who has spent the last two years of a 30-year career advising on Liverpool’s ambitious long-term development plans, the prospect of it all being lost due to the pandemic is unthinkable.
In June, Liverpool became one of the first UK cities to submit a fully costed post-Covid recovery plan to prime minister Boris Johnson and chancellor Rishi Sunak detailing the ways in which the city hopes to avert a socio-economic crisis “deeper than the 1980s recession”.
“What this crisis has done is to accelerate things we were already doing, made us focus really hard on the top priorities but recognise that the conditions for us and our private sector partners are much changed,” says Reeves. “Rather than ripping up the script, I think we have played to our strengths and that’s the key underpinning theme in the strategy that we’ve put together.”
Economic recovery plan
The Liverpool economic recovery plan, a 178-page, £1.4bn plan commissioned by Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson and co-signed by Steve Rotherham, metro mayor of the Liverpool city region and backed by 72 figures from the city’s commercial, legal, financial and cultural sectors, requests £200m of central government funding for construction projects and identifies 25 projects, most of which could begin before the end of 2020.
These include a new cruise terminal, a major housing development next to the International Festival Gardens site, the next phase of the city’s health innovation campus at Paddington Village, as well as a Science and Tech Innovation Centre, which will form part of the Liverpool John Moores University development at Copperas Hill in the city’s Knowledge Quarter.
Without the funding, however, the timetable for development appears less certain, stoking fears of a return to 1980s-style urban blight.
“You don’t want to think back to 20-30 years ago when going into a city centre was not something that you particularly wanted to do,” says Ian Taylor, partner and head of real estate and construction in the North West at RSM. “We have come a long way in making our city centres in the UK attractive and Liverpool is one of those. It’s a place where people want to spend time. If we don’t continue to develop that then the city centre will lose its pull.”
“There needs to be a focus around what we do to ensure that those places which are important to communities don’t get left behind,” says Stephen Cowperthwaite, principal and managing director for Liverpool at Avison Young.
Helen Brown, a partner in Brabners’ Liverpool office, says retail and leisure are in most pain in Liverpool. “We get calls every day from landlords in the retail and leisure sectors asking questions about the temporary Covid legislation and tactically what should they be doing to protect their own interests,” she says. “I don’t think anyone has the right answer. I think these temporary measures are going to have to continue to protect tenant businesses.”
Bill Addy, chief executive of the Liverpool BID Company, says footfall in the city’s central retail district was the highest it had ever been in February, before falling by 90% during April and May to just 120,000 people. Although that improved slightly over the summer, footfall remains at half its pre-pandemic level.
Desire for further devolution
As Liverpool’s various local leaders continue to battle to stave off the worst effects of the pandemic on the city and do what they can to rebuild activity, the crisis is convincing them that current powers for local government do not go far enough. That is fuelling a desire for further devolution.
“Being in a northern city region, we want and feel we need more devolution,” says Mark Bousfield, director of commercial development and investment at Liverpool City Region Combined Authority. “But there’s another point about certainty too. Allowing people like me and our private sector partners to plan into the future, rather than to have to respond to funding bids as they come out or are deferred and delayed.”
Reeves gives the example of Liverpool’s Knowledge Quarter, which is currently working with the city’s universities, Liverpool Science Park and Bruntwood SciTech. He says that under a more devolved administration the Quarter could also team up with Alderley Park in Cheshire and Oxford Road Corridor in Manchester to form a health, life sciences and digitech hub in the North West.
“Liverpool should have more autonomy,” he says. “I think it fits with the government’s levelling-up programme in the North. If all the decisions are made in Whitehall about what the North needs, I don’t think that’s going to work and I don’t think that’s playing to the strengths of the North.”
