Liverpool needs more middleweight developers, says council chief

LIVERPOOL cannot rely solely on Peel’s mammoth Liverpool Waters scheme to drive the development of its city centre, according to new city council chief executive Ged Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald said that while Peel is “a massive company who are very successful at what they do”, Liverpool can’t afford to miss other opportunities in the pursuit of the £5.5bn Liverpool Waters regeneration scheme.

“I will always look to work with companies who want to invest, but we can’t just rely on Peel to regenerate Liverpool,” he said.

“We need more people – not of Peel’s scale because that’s not realistic – but we need more of the middling-to-growing companies to continue the development that has benefited this city and its residents over the last decade.”

Fitzgerald also gave an assurance that the new cruise liner terminal would be built in the city, and his clearest indication yet that tourism and marketing body The Mersey Partnership could either be merged with another body like Liverpool Vision or wound up.

Speaking at a Downtown Liverpool in Business event, Fitzgerald answered a question from chairman Frank McKenna about there being too many agencies in the city by stating that his assessment was “a fair one”.

“That’s a question I’m grappling with at the moment, but haven’t been able to resolve,” he said.

He said that the Mersey Partnership had “some good people and a good board”.
“We need to be able to work with them to secure a future that is viable and sustainable.

“But it’s not rocket science to see that we need to sort it out. I want us to get to a situation at least in Liverpool where there’s a one-stop approach to it.”

Fitzgerald  also told TheBusinessDesk.com that it would look to pool money received from the new £60m Jessica fund with successful Regional Growth Fund bids.

Merseyside made 18 bids to the initial pot of RGF funding, which was hugely oversubscribed – nationally, bids worth almost £2.8bn were submitted for an initial pot of funding likely to be worth around £230m.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is due to announce which first round bids were successful on March 23 and open the second round on April 12.

Fitzgerald said that the Merseyside authorities were likely to wait until they gained feedback on their first funding rounds and saw the type of bids which were successful before applying for second-round funding.

Eventually, though, it hopes to combine mezzanine funding from the JESSICA initiative with equity packages from the Regional Growth Fund to ensure that the stalled regeneration schemes offering the greatest prospects for regeneration get off the ground quickly.

“Even though the apartment market is flat, there’s a lot of interest in properties in the city centre,” he said.