What We'd all Prefer to a Ringo Sing-a-Long...

What We’d all Prefer to a Ringo Sing-a-Long ...

By Laurence Westgaph

THE council may have to sell Millennium House in order to pay for this year’s festivities.

The £20m shortfall, that one Liberal Democrat official told me has been caused by “councillor cock-ups”, will leave us with a massive hang-over after the party is over.

If the government gives the go ahead then the Culture Company’s main office building could be put into trust using a process known as capitalisation.

Councillors, instead of the embarrassment of hocking one of your main office buildings, why not sell off the multitude of brownfield sites that have been allowed to fester by successive administrations for more than a quarter of a century?

These sites once provided a service to the community in the way of shops that employed people and provided revenue to the city through rates and council taxes.

I’m thinking of plots on Upper Parliament Street, where unique Georgian terraces were demolished and nothing was put back; Lodge Lane, where after the riots shops were replaced by poorly landscaped green areas, only useful for acting as litter traps and providing a benefit to no one apart from a few manky pigeons; and the acres of dereliction that we see in Everton, Kirkdale and Anfield really highlight the generations of neglect that have created a north-south divide in our beloved city.

Hey, but let’s look on the bright side. This funding crisis could be used to finally attract some private investment into these areas. For far too long deprivation and a lack of innovation has meant that the only organisations building in these communities are housing associations or other public bodies.

One of the main obstacles to progress is that thanks to the farcical Housing Market Renewal Initiative, the council gives ‘preferred developer’ status to ‘cardboard box’ volume house builders, allowing them to cherry pick sites for development. While these massive companies twiddle their thumbs deciding which sites they want to develop, smaller, usually local, developers are not allowed to buy any of the council owned sites.

In a country that supposedly believes in free trade, that seems suspiciously like a monopoly to me.

The council needs to sell off all their long-term derelict sites and use Compulsory Purchase Order powers if necessary to bring other land bankers to the negotiating table. It seems awfully hypocritical to continue to persecute homeowners with the threat of CPOs for wanting nothing more than to stay in their well-maintained homes, while multi-millionaire property speculators allow our built heritage to fall into the ground.

What this £20m debacle really highlights is just how out of touch the council is when it comes to realising what is important for the real people of Liverpool.

We all love a good knees up, but at the end of the day I think what many of us would prefer, rather than a sing song from Ringo, is the chance to live in decent, well maintained neighbourhoods, in a city where the majority of dereliction is not owned by the city.

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