As the Black Country Enterprise Zone kicks into gear, many will be watching for positive effects on commercial property in Wolverhampton and nearby areas.
Carillion is currently conducting reviews of the existing planning
processes in Wolverhampton with a view to encouraging commercial property development. The construction services company has headquarters in Wolverhampton, and has been using its knowledge of Wolverhampton and the wider Black Country to look at ways of attracting investment in commercial property and other parts of the local economy.
Carillion describes the Wolverhampton planning process as one needing ‘fundamental change’. It needs to support “investment opportunities rather than controlling development and legislating” against commercial property and other initiatives, is the message. Four local authorities, Wolverhampton, Walsall, Sandwell and Dudley, are now collaborating to facilitate this. Developers submitting plans for commercial property in Wolverhampton are already said to be benefitting, with reports of “significantly speedier decisions and a better service”.
The Enterprise Zone concept is one of Chancellor George Osborne’s flagship projects. He has bestowed Enterprise Zone status on twenty-one regions across England, including Leeds, Liverpool and Greater Manchester. These are set to benefit from tax breaks, accelerated commercial property development via relaxed planning processes, and superfast broadband to aid business growth.
The government expects local expansion arising from Enterprise Zones to yield over 30,000 new jobs by 2015. Prime Minister David Cameron said he hopes new companies seeking commercial property will find “Britain the best place in the world to start and grow a new business”.
During the industrial revolution Wolverhampton was very much at the heart of the action. Coal mines and steel mills helped cover the land in black soot, which is how many believe the Black Country got its name. Fast forward to the twenty-first century and the plan is to take Wolverhampton back to its manufacturing roots, but with a contemporary approach.
The i54 is a commercial property built to cater for technology companies. An aerospace commercial property is being built on the site, which is envisaged as becoming a technology-based business park. Wolverhampton City Council has already expressed a wish for the commercial property to be used for this purpose, rather than “a site used for storage and warehouses”.
Wolverhampton’s experience of previous Enterprise Zone initiatives may be behind this sentiment. In the 1980s, Dudley, down the road from Wolverhampton, became one of the Thatcher government’s first Enterprise Zones. The commercial property focus then was on constructing a retail park, which, according to John Rider, Chairman of the Institute of Directors in the West Midlands, was a concept “reasonable enough, but the reality was they displaced a lot of jobs”.
Wolverhampton, Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall councils have now combined with private and public sector organisations to produce a Black Country Core Strategy. Encompassing the views of everyone from commercial property developers to community bodies, the result is a “spatial planning document”. Commercial property development, alongside residential regeneration, will form the basis for a programme setting out objectives for development in Wolverhampton and the wider Black Country until 2026.
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