Regeneration is one of the few sectors where Britain still leads the world. Ian Halstead sees what's happening in the Midlands.
Give us your base industrial wastelands, your polluted sites, your derelict factories, and we will transmute them into golden opportunities.
Transforming unwanted urban locations into such landmark schemes as Birmingham's Brindleyplace, Derby's Pride Park and Dudley's Merry Hill has put the Midlands on the global regeneration map.
Indeed such is the reputation of the Midlands' alchemy for bringing new economic life to neglected sites that people like Walsall Regeneration Company (WRC) chief executive, Dr Peter Cromar, are regularly taking the can do message overseas.
As we speak he is off to a conference in the Lithuanian capital of Riga, after the organisers were impressed by his presentation on WRC's activities at the huge international real estate show MIPIM.
Cromar's visit is well-timed; with site work due to begin on several major regeneration schemes in the Black Country town. Skanksa-Innisfree's redevelopment of Manor Hospital, Shepherd Construction's Walsall College project, Jessup's Waterfront South scheme and Urban Splash's plans add up to some £31.3bn of investment.
To many, regeneration often appears a laborious and painful process, in which the views of everyone must be sought ad nauseam and boxes must be ticked until the pen runs dry.
Cromar prefers the bigger picture. "It's a big issue. You always need to look at potential end-users when you first start thinking about remediation proposals, let alone a regeneration strategy," he says.
"If you are just going to green a site over, for example, it reduces your options. You must always look at and understand an area in the round, you can't just think site-specific."
Cromar considers it essential to engage with the Environment Agency as early as possible, something many leave until the later stages.
Equally, he is no disciple of the little step by little step approach. "If you want to generate long-term and successful solutions, you have to make the process more sophisticated from the start," says Cromar.
"You need to understand both the strategy and the business model and be able to articulate and promote solutions against a real-life political backdrop. It doesn't mean everything will take longer, but you do build more solid partnerships and the solution is then more likely to meet common needs."
Nor is Cromar interested in the blue sky thinkers who dominate many regeneration agendas. "People spend far too much time thinking about structure, when they should be focusing on devising solutions. No-one in the private sector is interested in the theory," he says.
Cromar's comments bring assent from PricewaterhouseCoopers' (PwC) partner Richard Parker, who operates UK-wide with local authorities, central government and English Partnerships.
"Both sides really must make their agendas clear and ensure they are attempting to achieve the same aims," he says. "Councils can assemble sites, have competitions to choose developers and have schemes built out. The biggest challenge, though, is ensuring the projects are viable and sustainable."
Parker fears the long-term economic case is not always made for public sector-led regeneration projects.
"When masterplanning begins and when public funding is going into a scheme, we need to look over 15, 20 or even 25 years to ensure the proposals are viable," he says.
"Assessments on many schemes haven't been as robust as they should have been. We must always judge what outputs will be delivered and at what cost."
Parker says public sector bodies must also calculate what returns their funding will generate.
"Local authorities are recognising that they will struggle to achieve government support, if they just plead on a need basis," he adds. "If public money is going into a regeneration scheme, a solid case has to be made at both the economic and political levels."
The PwC observer is concerned at the speed with which sites are brought forward by public sector agencies. "It takes longer than it should and longer than the private sector would take. The processes do need streamlining and there should be more efficient and cleverer channels for grants and consents," says Parker.
"However, if we are looking at long-term development sites, they should be able to survive changes introduced because of fad or fashion."
Parker's suggestion, that both sectors must understand each other rather better, strikes a chord with Cobbetts' partner Amanda Hanmore.
"We act for a number of local authorities on the estates side and planning issues are a regular hurdle," she says. "Quite often you have internal battles between different council departments and I don't think developers working with councils realise they won't get any favours on their application."
Hanmore recalls one case where a developer simply gave up after its proposals were rejected.
"I was working for them, on behalf of a local authority which was keen to see a leisure centre built. They submitted their plans, but they were rejected and so they just walked away."
Hanmore also shares the view of Castlemore's Eric Hall that the differing skill levels of council officers can delay schemes. "More authorities are now willing to bring in external advisers," he says, "because they recognise that their staff sometimes haven't got the necessary experience, but not all do, which can cause delay."
Paul Spencer, European director at Jones Lang LaSalle, says the relationships between the private and public in regeneration are becoming simultaneously closer and more complex.
Increasingly brownfield development sites are coming from public bodies and local authorities rather than the private sector: the transfer of MoD properties to English Partnerships is a classic example.
And he says, the private sector is being given additional confidence with increasing moves towards masterplanning, which means developers can proceed with a clear idea of how their projects will fit into the wider economic framework and, bluntly, who the neighbours will be.
However, ownership of land and planning powers does not give the public sector the whip hand.
Spencer adds: "One of the most important issues is the relationship between the developer and regeneration agency. The agencies think it's their job to select a developer, while in fact it's more a case of the developer selecting them. There's no shortage of regeneration opportunities available, either in the Midlands or nationally, and developers are increasingly selective about where they go and who they work with."
Sometimes sites come forward slowly by virtue of the need to ensure comprehensive remediation. As Moucher Parkman has found at the i54 site, brownfield land can have all sorts of nasties lurking under the surface.
Southam-based consultancy CL Associates is, like PwC's Parker, working across the UK with a range of public and private sector clients on regeneration schemes.
Director Roger Clark considers it likely that the need to remediate brownfield sites for homes will increase to meet government housing targets.
"Either green belt land or sites previously not considered for residential uses will soon have to be used and possibly both," he says.
Five years ago Clark was called up to Durham to assess the chances of using old coking works for housing and those plans are now being revived. Former gas works and redundant collieries not used in previous development phases of former British Coal sites are other possibilities.
Clark believes the search for new sites, coupled with recent legislation, is likely to lead to a rash of legal cases.
"Under the Environmental Act, local authorities must look at all sites in their areas and if harm is being caused they can force people to resolve the problem," he says. "The legislation has been in place for a while, but we are now seeing actions taking place, based on the principle that the polluter pays. If the firm involved can't be found, the next target will be the landowner."
Clark says developers who have bought former petrol stations are becoming targets for such actions.
"Modern fuel tanks are usually double-skinned, but old ones aren't and we're seeing a lot of cases of hydrocarbon and fuel pollution from derelict industrial premises or old filling stations," he says.
"Typically, a tank has leaked slowly for a long period and the fuel has leaked under the road and now come up close to homes."