Recently it was announced that the developer agreement is close to sign-off. Ladywood Unite do not support signing of the developer agreement. It is not mainly the uncertainty of the regeneration that is a problem for us – it is the prospect of what will happen to us as it goes ahead. This regeneration is a financial catastrophe for the public purse waiting to happen and has all the indicators it will lead to social and ethnic cleansing of a diverse and well loved area while also violating the human rights of landowners, displacing faith communities and failing to provide for the housing needs of the city.
Read the press here and our response below.
Our reply
The council has made bold, unchallenged claims in the above article, which give a misleading impression of how the regeneration is likely to proceed, based on legal frameworks and similar projects across the UK. For instance, the article framed the information about 20% affordable housing and the reprovision of council stock within Phase 1 as if it were new developments. However, these were already outlined in the Cabinet Report. Despite this, Councillor Thompson presented them as the outcome of more recent negotiations, which raises some serious questions.
1. Affordable housing is usually priced at 80% market price. This calculation of affordability does not make the new houses attainable if there is not a commitment from the council to provide social housing and council housing.
2. The “guarantee for affected residents that they will be able to stay” is not binding at the moment. There are not formal guarantees that council tenants will be able to stay in the area. The current version of the residents’ charter on this matter is full of conditionals on this matter. Moreover, the provision of “affordable” remains subject to viability – meaning that the delivery of “affordable housing” is dependent on the developer achieving 15-20% profit margins.
3. Freeholders and leaseholds are usually only offered the opportunity to have a new home if they are willing to partly share their ownership with the developer or the council. This usually means accepting more fees and expense associated with service charges for their new properties. Many people who have accepted such deals wish they have not. (https://corporatewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Corporate-Watch-Lesnes-Estate-Development.pdf)
4. The financial risks of a project of this size are enormous for the public. This project is so large in scale that no other developer was willing to take it on, resulting in the use of an extraordinary single bidder process. In the event of developer exit, which is relatively common in regenerations, the Council would be legally obligated to cover the costs associated with CPO payouts, placing additional strain on its already stretched finances. There are viable alternatives that could preserve over 90% of existing properties, significantly reduce embodied carbon, and still meet housing density requirements while increasing social and affordable housing availability. Although we have told the Council about these options, they have indicated they do not wish to consider them, and we are pursuing them ourselves.
Ladywood Unite 
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