The Assistant Director Property & Regeneration Investment has approved:

(1) the draft Indicative Site Development Plan for Price Street Car Park Birkenhead; and

(2) that the Council shall proceed with legal agreements necessary to enable Wirral Growth Company LLP to proceed with the RIBA Stage 1 Design process, soft market testing and review of the soft market testing exercise as part of the proposals set out in the draft indicative Site Development Plan as a pre-requisite to any decision to proceed to RIBA Stage 2 and beyond.

The Price Street Car Park forms a critical part of Birkenhead Town Centre regeneration. The site is a cleared surface car park adjacent to Conway Street Train Station and its re-development formed part of the hybrid planning application secured by Wirral Growth Company in 2021. The site was included as a priority option site within the Wirral Growth Company Partnership Agreement but was removed from that along with all other option sites in 2022.

The hybrid consent proposed 189 residential apartments for the site and the proposed scheme was allocated £3.1m from Future High Street Fund. Following the site’s removal from Wirral Growth Company’s control in 2022 Wirral Borough Council undertook a procurement exercise utilising Homes England DPS Framework but no development partners were identified. A further soft marketing exercise followed which resulted in interest being identified from two regional developers but a procurement compliant structure for disposal and development could not be agreed.

Future High Street Funding through the Pathfinder Programme requires that the grant is spent by March 2026. Following the failure of procurement exercises and the urgent need to both deliver this critical phase of regeneration and not suffer clawback of grant, the Council has engaged with Wirral Growth Company as its pre-procured development partner to re-examine the business case for the accelerated delivery of residential led development of the site.

Do nothing. This would result in the potential clawback of the Future High Street Fund and not bring forward wider regeneration benefits. The Future High Street process has been lengthy and protracted, taking several years to date including the Pathfinder process that has elongated timescales from March 2024 to March 2026. Despite these delays the spend profile and project completion date of March 2026 remains, so it is imperative to avoid further delay and commence activity to develop and deliver the projects.

Seek to identify an alternative delivery partner via a competitive process that can bring forward suitable proposals within the very restricted timetable linked to grant funding. This would result in delays that are likely to take the Council past the grant drop-dead date. The use of WGC as the Councils re-procured delivery partner will better meet the timetable.