Western Daily Press (Saturday)
‘You can’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good’
The views from the top of the new tallest residential building in Bristol are spectacular, but Tristan Cork hears how affordable housing was drastically cut to see it built
This is where you have to make some pragmatic decisions. You can hold out for the higher number of affordable on a complex city centre site, and then it doesn’t get built BRISTOL MAYOR MARVIN REES
THE Mayor of Bristol has defended a decision which has seen the biggest residential development in the city centre in a generation go ahead – but with only half the affordable homes it should have.
Marvin Rees said the decision was taken to allow developers to break the council’s policy that insists 40 per cent of all homes in developments in the city centre should be affordable – so that the scheme could go ahead.
Developers Bouygues won planning permission in 2018 to build Castle Park View – the 26-storey tower block complex that is now nearing completion, and with its landmark building now a major feature of the Bristol skyline.
The entire development site on the south-east corner of Castle Park was the former central ambulance station and headquarters for Bristol, and had been empty for years before developers finally won permission.
The land was owned by a combination of Bristol City Council and, because it was originally owned by the NHS, by Homes England – the government land and housing agency that controls state-owned land. Despite being under public control, when developers came up with a plan to build 375 flats there, they initially proposed that only 12 per cent of those flats would be “affordable” – for local people on the housing waiting list.
The council has a policy for almost all residential development – anything over 15 new homes – that 30 per cent of new homes built should be affordable across the city. In the centre, that rises to 40 per cent. So Bouygues’ 375 flats at Castle Park View should have included 150 affordable homes – either homes rented through the council’s Home Choice system, or homes offered for shared ownership, or through a keyworker housing scheme.
Back in 2016 and 2017, Bouygues and council housing chiefs negotiated a deal which lifted the proposal for 12 per cent affordable, up to 20 per cent – which means one of the five apartment blocks is being handed over to the housing association Abri.
It contains 75 flats, 17 of which will be offered under a shared ownership scheme, and the other 58 will be rented by Abri through the council’s Home Choice housing waiting list system.
But in recent years, across the city, the council has consistently failed to enforce its own policy of having 30 or 40 per cent affordable homes in large scale developments, and Mr Rees said the priority with the site that became Castle Park View was to make sure something got built there, and it didn’t continue to be left empty for years.
There had been other gains as well as getting 75 affordable flats built, including making sure the development connected to the fledgling Bristol heat network, as well as the development kickstarting other investments in the city.
“The housing crisis is significant, 13,000 people on the waiting list, 1,000 households in temporary accommodation, so the scale is big,” he said.
“But this is 375 homes, with 20 per cent, that’s 75, affordable, and it makes a contribution, but also what we’ve learned about partnership working, brownfield developments, in the middle of the city, connecting to the heat network – all that comes from this scheme, and just continues the momentum we’ve got around delivering homes for people in Bristol,” he added.
“This is where you have to make some pragmatic decisions. You can hold out for the higher number of affordable on a complex city centre site, and then it doesn’t get built. We made a decision early on with the housing leaders to say, ‘Well, actually let’s start saying to developers that if you’re coming through at pace, if you’re getting delivery, then we can actually negotiate with you over that share of affordable’,” he said.
The mayor hinted that the deal negotiated back in 2017 might not be the same if negotiated now, saying the council was in a stronger position because developers are keen to invest in Bristol more now than they were then. “Now we’ve proven delivery,
Bristol’s a strong market, people know they can come here and work, so that’s going to be the subject of negotiation in the future,” he said.
“An empty site for four or five years wouldn’t have been good for Bristol, this is about getting the homes delivered for people that need to live here right here, right now,” he said.
After Bouygues’ initial offer of 12 per cent affordable was negotiated up to 20 per cent, Savills in Bristol wrote a “viability report” which explained to planners why the development would fail to meet the 40 per cent affordable council policy.
In that 2017 viability report, real estate firm Savills told planners that the development would bring in £84 million to Bouygues in income if the council let it only build 20 per cent affordable, but if the 40 per cent rule was enforced, the bottom line would drop to £73.5 million. Construction costs would be the same – at around £58.6 million.
Savills claimed that with only 20 per cent affordable, Bouygues would make £4.3 million profit, but if it had to increase that to 40 per cent, and provide a total of 150 flats through a housing association rather than its own private rental scheme, it would make a loss on the whole project.
One of the reasons Savills claimed this was the case was because the site was sloped, from the edge of Castle Park down to the Floating Harbour, and there were challenges constructing large buildings on the water’s edge. The extra costs incurred by this meant the developer couldn’t then afford to include more homes for local Bristol people on the housing waiting list.
This was a claim accepted by the Mayor at the time who, four years on, said getting 75 affordable homes built was better than the zero that would otherwise have happened.
“It was a complex site, and we wouldn’t have got anything done,” he said.
“These are the challenges we keep sharing – it’s a complicated city. There’s the world as we’d like it to be, and the world as it is, and in the world as it is, you have to work out how you can get things done and you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
“This is a fantastic scheme for Bristol.”
The 75 affordable flats are in one apartment block on the corner of the site nearest the St Philip and St James Church, which will be managed by housing association Abri. The rest in Castle Park View tower itself and the three other apartment blocks on the site, will all be for private rent.
The council’s cabinet member for housing, Cllr Tom Renhard, said this was important too.
“The affordable housing on the site will go through our housing register,
our HomeChoice system, which is under review right now. It will be prioritised based on need through our banding system,” he said.
“With the build-to-rent, we hear from people about there being a shortage of private rented sector properties in the city so actually this is good news for people, there’s 300 more properties they can potentially rent, and particularly we have a shortage of properties of one or two beds, which is what people are looking for,” he added.
There is no word yet on how much an apartment at Castle Park View will cost to rent, either through the private rented scheme or the “affordable” flats through the council and Abri.
In the original planning application, Savills described the private rented flats as being at the “higher end of the rented spectrum”.
Architects said they were keen to make sure there was little difference between the affordable housing block – which is a separate building – and none of the controversial “poor door” features that have caused uproar in major residential developments in London.
Nick Thursby, from architect firm Chapman Taylor, said they wanted to avoid a phenomenon seen notoriously in London’s landmark developments, where the people living in the affordable flats are “ghettoised” with separate doors and restrictions on the facilities.