Meet the men leading £4bn Victoria North ‘new town’ project
“ANYTHING under £25 million is done on WhatsApp,” says Gavin Taylor, regional general manager at Far East Consortium, as he describes how bosses at the Hong Kong investment company keep the decisionmaking process as streamlined as possible.
With an annual revenue of 7.5 billion Hong Kong dollars last year, it is perhaps also an indicator of how deep FEC’s pockets are.
The company, registered in the Cayman Islands, was first listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange by Deacon Chiu in 1972.
Mr Chiu, who died in 2015, was a major figure in global business circles, having also held the position of chairman of Asia Television Limited in the 1980s.
He was said to have been a scrupulous bean counter – legend has it that employees were rationed to two pieces of toilet paper a day.
These days FEC is run primarily by his son David Chiu.
It has property interests in seven countries, with a lot of investment tied up in hotels and car parks.
And over the next 15 years it will be pumping millions of pounds into regenerating one of the most deprived parts of Manchester in a joint venture with Manchester city council.
For years, the project has been known as ‘Northern Gateway,’ but the M.E.N. can reveal it is being rebranded as ‘Victoria North.’
Mr Taylor and project director Tom Fenton explained what FEC hopes to achieve and why the name has been changed.
‘Manchester is on the up, diversify from London’
Although FEC now has around 25 staff in a regional office in Manchester, David Chiu remains ‘the driving force’ behind the organisation, Mr Taylor said.
He first visited Manchester six years ago to look at potential investment.
“He is incredibly passionate about the region,” said Mr Taylor. “He likes to personally meet people, get a feel for it, walk the streets, eat in the restaurants, and he genuinely had a passion at that time.
“He had a relationship with [former chief executive of Manchester city council] Sir Howard Bernstein, he had a relationship with other key individuals in the city, he had individuals within central government advising him ‘Manchester is on the up, diversify from London into Manchester’ so on the back of that we did a series of investigations and looked for our first site in the region which was Angel Meadows.
“We went from there, developed Meadowside and used that as a springboard into the ‘Northern Gateway.’”
Meadowside is a set of three multi-storey blocks of flats around the historic park next to the Co-Op headquarters in the NOMA district.
It is a major project worth more than £200m that will deliver more than 750 apartments.
But that figure is dwarfed in comparison to the longterm vision promised by FEC in its joint venture with Manchester council that is now said to be worth £4bn.
Over the next two decades, the aim is to build around 15,000 new homes as well as new schools, transport links, healthcare facilities and green space.
The area being looked at is huge, 390 acres in total, starting at the edge of the city centre and stretching nearly two miles to Queens Park, with Cheetham Hill and Strangeways on one side and Miles Platting and Monsall on the other.
‘Victoria North - the natural evolution of the city centre’
Given the scale of the ambition and its new direction, the council and FEC have decided the project needs to be rebranded.
Within Victoria North area there will be seven districts that are set to be rebuilt: Collyhurst Village, South Collyhurst, New Cross, New Town, Red Bank, Vauxhall Gardens and Smedley Dip & Eggington Street.
“Enshrining Victoria within the name was important just to give it that anchor to the city centre,” said Mr Fenton.
“We keep banding numbers around, potentially 15,000 new homes in the next 15 to 20 years, a population of somewhere around 35,000 people, it’s effectively a new town, right on the periphery of the city centre.”
The name change was signed off by the city council’s leader Sir Richard Leese who noted ‘Northern Gateway’ could be confused with other projects of the same title in the country.
‘I think we’ve failed if residents see it as slum clearance’
There has been much talk about whether Manchester city centre’s phenomenal growth in recent decades has driven an increased divide between the ‘haves and have nots.’
Many parts of the city remain among the most deprived in the country, with entrenched poverty stemming back to Manchester’s industrial decline since the 1950s.
Collyhurst is a case in point where studies have suggested more than half of all children live in poverty.
Promises of regeneration go back decades, with the most recent false dawn in 2010 when the government withdrew PFI funding for a £2bn housing scheme. Mr Fenton says that is why this time FEC and the council have to get it right.
The Victoria North project was touched on in the recent BBC documentary series Manctopia which showed long-term resident Anne Worthington fearing she will be ‘forced out’ of her home. She described having had her family’s home bought under a compulsory purchase order (CPO) when she was 17 as part of a ‘slum clearance.’
Anne had imagined she would live in her new home – which she bought under Right To Buy in 1998 – for the rest of her life.
Asked if he fears Victoria North will be viewed as a ‘slum clearance,’ Mr Fenton said: “I think we’ve failed if it does. A lot of residents want shops and services but understand that actually the area has been so depopulated there’s not enough people to sustain those types of things that they want.
“So there in this perverse trap of, if you want to go to the shop you have to get on the bus and spend money, or to go to the cash machine, they have to spend money to go and do that, it’s bonkers. I think there’s an acceptance that repopulation is a good thing, it’s making sure people aren’t marginalised and it’s about creating a diverse community where everybody’s welcome, and everybody has a place there.”
Manchester council’s policy is that any new development should include 20pc affordable housing – but that has rarely been achieved in the city centre.
Almost without exception, developers argue their schemes would not be financially ‘viable’ unless all properties are sold at market rate.
Mr Fenton and Mr Taylor confirmed the 20pc target is a binding clause of their joint venture agreement with the council, as is a commitment than anyone forced to move will be able to remain in place until a new home is available.
The first planning application for Collyhurst Village includes 130 new council homes, although 29 will be demolished, mixed in with those for sale on the market, while a second application has gone in for a further 30 council homes in Collyhurst South.
The bulk of the £31.2m cost of constructing of the social homes will come from Manchester council via the city’s Housing Revenue Account (HRA), and the rest from government grant funding, not FEC.
It is understood the council will then retain ownership of these homes and they will be managed by Northwards – the council’s social housing management arm.
They’ve invested £76m and not a penny’s gone back’
Beyond Collyhurst, the next focus for Victoria North will be Redbank, the area of largely disused industrial land opposite the Green Quarter.
Around 5,500 homes are expected to be delivered in Redbank over the next 10 years.
Much of the initial investment is coming from central government, with £51.6m awarded by Homes England to unlock the land for development.
But the FEC Manchester team are adamant the company is invested in the long-term success of the joint venture.
Mr Taylor said: “When we’re talking the end game in Manchester, we’re talking 15, 16, 17 years, and that’s quite rare in the market at the moment, the vast majority of these towers you see going up are PRS (Private Rented Sector), IRR (Internal Rate of Return) driven, ‘let’s get a quick buck, let’s turn it and let’s move on.’”
Mr Fenton added: “If you look at their investment in Manchester, I think they’ve invested £76m to date in the last five years and not a penny’s gone back the other way yet.
“A lot of that is invested in construction in Meadowside but we’ve probably invested circa £30m on land assembly and we’re committed to providing £25m of investment into infrastructure as part of the Joint Venture agreement, all of that will be for wider public betterment.
“It could be for public transport, remediation of contaminated land.
“If it was about a quick buck they would’ve been in and out already, it’s not about that.”