Approved at last: Plans for 175,000 new homes across Greater Manchester

Dear Millers – welcome to this week’s briefing, featuring a scrapped low traffic neighbourhood in Withington, a very lovely home in Altrincham, a very unpopular theatre review in the Guardian and a special Mill discount to an upcoming concert at The Hallé.

But first, we got a huge response to our weekend read about the Night & Day saga. “Excellent reporting (as it's becoming usual) from @ManchesterMill on a case that is much more nuanced than what seemed at first,” tweeted Paolo Sandro. Mancunian chronicler Andy Spinoza said the piece provided “fascinating revelations” and a Miller called Fraser said it was a “phenomenal piece of writing”. “Oh man I've been waiting for this article for so long,” wrote one member in the comments. 

The piece threw some new light on a story that’s had a huge amount of coverage, although not everyone ended up on one side or the other. “That article made me have sympathy for and intense dislike for both sides. Weird,” someone posted on Reddit. Please keep your comments and shares coming.

Get us over the line: If you like the kind of reporting we did this weekend and you’re not yet a paying Miller, please join up now. Stories like this take a lot of reporting, editing, fact-checking and buying pints for sources in dingy city centre pubs, and none of that is cheap, particularly the pints. We think it’s important for the city to have journalism that doesn’t just jump on the latest social media bandwagon but instead takes some time to work out what is actually going on. If you agree, please join the community for just £70 a year (prices are going up to £89 per year next week, so this is your last chance to come in at our old price). We’re just three members away from hitting our March target of 125 newbies, so you can get us over the line too.

A story of love, political intrigue and revenge

From today’s sponsor: Abductions, murders in the palace and a plot to overthrow the aristocracy: Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra is an opera built around intrigue and revenge. On Thursday 18 April, you can watch a concert performance of this classical favourite at The Bridgewater Hall as Manchester’s world-class orchestra The Hallé teams up with Opera Rara and the Chorus of Opera North. They will be under the direction of the legendary Sir Mark Elder, providing one of the final chances to see Elder in action before he steps down as Music Director after 24 years. Click here to get your tickets, and make sure to enter themill18 in the promo code box to get 25% off.

This week’s weather

Our weekly forecast is from local weatherman Martin Miles, who says to expect: “another chilly and unsettled week of weather, although temperatures will at least recover a little in time for the Easter weekend.”

Monday🌧️ Cloudy with outbreaks of rain, especially during the morning. Max 9°c.

Tuesday⛅️ A better start with occasional bright spells but turning damp and cloudy as rain returns later in the afternoon. Max 10°c.

Wednesday🌦️ Windy with heavy showers interspersed with sunny spells. Max 10°c.

Thursday🌦️ Mixed fortunes consisting of sunny spells and showers. Breezy. Max 11°c.

Friday🌦️ Milder but still changeable with sunshine and heavy showers. Windy. Max 14°c.

Weekend🌦️ Calmer and milder with fewer showers to contend with as air pressure rises. Feeling pleasant in any sunshine that breaks through. Highs around 14°c.

You can find the latest forecast at Manchester Weather on Facebook — daily forecasts are published at 6.15am.

The big story: Approved at last: Plans for 175,000 new homes across Greater Manchester 

Top line: Places for Everyone, Greater Manchester’s flagship — though controversial — plan for regional growth over the next fifteen years, was formally adopted last week. Its approval follows ten years of back-and-forth, a name change and one borough dramatically pulling out. As recently as last year it looked dead in the water.

Green belt released: The major faultline in the last decade has been the release of green belt land for housing. The plans allocate 5,500 acres. It’s relatively small in the scale of the plan —  of the 175,000 new homes promised to be delivered, 18,500 will be on the greenbelt. The rest is set to be built in urban areas and on brownfield sites.

Green belt has acted as a major constraint on development in Greater Manchester, covering almost half of the city region.

Context: Places for Everyone is the successor to the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework (scintillating name, we know), which the region started work on in 2014. The ink had barely dried before there was outcry over the amount of building on greenbelt, so Andy Burnham rejigged the proposal in 2017 to focus more on brownfield sites.

• That wasn’t enough for Stockport’s Lib Dem Coucil, who pulled out of the plan in 2020. It needed the support of all ten boroughs to work, so it was back to the drawing board.

• A new plan was formed covering the other nine boroughs and named Places for Everyone. (Everyone, that is, except those living in Stockport).

Current location of green belt in Greater Manchester. Image credit: https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/media/1739/green-belt-topic-paper-w-cover-web.pdf

Get building: The strategy includes plans to build 175,000 new homes and millions of sq ft of industrial parks and offices, and will be a driver for development and jobs growth. It’s the only multi-borough plan of its kind outside of London. Eamonn Boylan, the chief executive of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, said that the plan’s approval will provide a “degree of certainty” for people looking to invest in the region.

Last January, it looked like the plan was about to fall apart for the second time, due to a trailed policy change by the government. This would have meant targets being watered down and made no longer mandatory.

• This emboldened councillors and local MPs opposed to the plans. Bury North MP James Daly wrote to the council and Michael Gove saying the new guidance would “clearly require Bury Council to withdraw from ‘Places for Everyone’”.

• In the end, though, there was enough political will locally to get the plan over the line

So what now? The delays to the plan’s approval have been a big obstacle to local councils wanting to draw up their own local housing plans. Places for Everyone supplies a framework of land that can be released, but it is still up to local councils to fill in the blanks. “This is a big thing” says Paul Smith, managing director of The Strategic Land Group. “Mainly because it unlocks a second wave of plan-making.”

• That’s long overdue in some cases. There are members of Mill staff who are younger than Bury’s most recent local plan, agreed in 1997.

However, changes in the planning process, drafted as part of Levelling Up and coming into force this year, will further delay this work. “You could be looking at until 2030,” until local plans are in place, Smith says. And, as these plans develop: It’s not inconceivable that, when they do their plans, that more greenbelt is released.”

Over in Stockport, the black sheep borough of this whole affair — whose Lib Dem council got in on the promise to stop greenbelt building and pull out of the plans — a local plan should be going to consultation in the next 18 months. The council have been bouncing back appeals to build on greenbelt since it pulled out, leading local councillors to predict overbuilding in the town centre.

• One councillor told us: “If you’re growing up in Bramhall or Marple, move to the town centre or wait for your parents to die.”

Bottom line: The approval of Places for Everyone gives the nine local authorities involved a framework to build their own plans within. But the houses won’t be going up any time soon. There’s still plenty of scope for local opposition and council delays to hold up much needed housebuilding.

Your Mill briefing

🎭 When we saw the Royal Exchange’s new production of A Taste of Honey last week, we found it very moving and thought-provoking, but also very funny. It’s a big moment for the city to stage Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 classic again, a play that caused huge controversy when it first appeared, and director Emma Baggott has pulled it off magnificently. 

The Guardian’s critic wasn’t as impressed. “There needs to be a serious interrogation of the necessity of the play for today,” he wrote in a review that only devoted five paragraphs to a major northern production. On Twitter, the journalist Jordan Tyldesley called the review “pathetic”, adding: “The play was written in 1958. What does a ‘serious interrogation’ of its ‘necessity’ mean? Cancelling it? Grow up.” Scroll down for a more positive review in The Times. 

🚄 A rare success story from the world of big public projects: the Transpennine upgrade. Dubbed — perhaps slightly optimistically — “Crossrail of the North”, the rebuilding of the rail line between Manchester and Leeds is set to be delivered on time and under budget, says the Sunday Times. At a time when we are mostly reading about things going millions over budget and decades to deliver, it’s pretty refreshing. The route will be completed four years ahead of schedule, in 2037, according to its project boss, Neil Holm. Once completed, it will cut travel time between Manchester and York to 63 minutes. The first section of the line, between Manchester and Stalybridge passed a test train trial earlier this month.

🌆 A ReactNews investigation reveals that Manchester City Council overspent by £7 million when buying its largest ever land acquisition, Central Retail Park on Great Ancoats Street. The council did not seek an official valuation, relying on the judgement of Sir Howard Bernstein’s son Jonathan, who estimated it was worth somewhere between £25 million and £30 million. A “prominent Manchester developer” bid £28 million for the site, before the council intervened and bought it for £35 million. 

🚗 There was a protest over a low traffic neighbourhood scheme in Withington over the weekend. Demonstrators came out in support of the scheme, which was rumoured to be getting pulled last week. Pia, the organiser, told us she was worried for the safety of her children and was "disillusioned" by the decision. She said that councillors had caved to preserve votes from the anti-LTN faction. 

💸  It’s going to cost at least £6m to repair the crumbling roof over Bury market, according to a surveyor’s report. Last October, part of the market was closed after it turned out its roof was built with Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC). You may recall the schools last year that had to delay their reopenings after finding they had been built with RAAC, which is fragile and risks collapse.

👨‍🎓 The University of Manchester is among a group of elite universities that gets most of their fees from overseas students. According to The Times, the university gets 64.1% of its fees from its foreign students, who in some cases pay double the fees of UK students. 

Our favourite reads

A Taste of Honey review — Shelagh Delaney’s debut still cuts deep — The Times

Jo and Helen, the mother and daughter in Shelagh Delaney’s iconic portrait of life in 1950s working-class Salford, are gifted “the eloquence of figures from a Greek tragedy” in this adaptation of A Taste of Honey, writes The Times’ chief theatre critic. It’s showing at the Royal Exchange until 13 April.

Before the Smiths were the Smiths — Dave Haslam

This story explores the early days of The Smiths, paying particular attention to their first ever manager, Joe Moss, “an original beatnik and a true bohemian” who noticed Johnny Marr’s proficiency with a guitar and encouraged him to go knock on Morrissey’s door, who he admired as a talented lyricist. “Without him there wouldn’t have been any Smiths,” Johnny Marr said.

How Do We Reclaim the Northern Soul? — Novara

“If there is such thing as a rose-tinted fetishisation of the north, it will be found foremost in Manchester,” writes Novara’s northern editor Craig Gent, in this study of how Northern England was torn apart, and how it can come back together. “It’s a twisted irony that the civic emblem of the worker bee has become omnipresent in the city at the same time as rents have gone up, wages have slowed, and jobs have become more precarious.”

Home of the week

This three-bedroom Edwardian home is a short walk from Altrincham town centre and Dunham Massey. £575,000.

Our to do list

Tuesday

🇳🇬 There’s a free screening of SEE MY WORLD: Manchester, Lagos & Me, a new film exploring the political conditions that artists operate under in Manchester and Lagos, at Contact Theatre. Tickets here.

☀️ The Beeswing, a tapas and wine bar on Kampus, is one of the best al fresco dining spots in the city centre, with plenty of sun hitting the terrace all day and cosy outdoor seating. Book a table here.

Wednesday

📚 Altogether Otherwise, who offer free craft, food and gardening workshops in the heart of NOMA every week, have a monthly book club that explores radical ideas in the literary world. Book a place here.

🎞️ Kino Film Festival shows the best new films from North West creatives. It’s a great way to get to know other creatives in the city and sit back and watch some fun, experimental films. £4.50.

Thursday 

👞 Avalon Emerson, a rising star in the electronica and shoegaze scene, is performing a rare gig at Hidden, get tickets here.

🍷 There’s a monthly jazz night at Flawd, the wine bar and small plates restaurant on the marina in Ancoats. This month’s edition features bassist Asaph Tal and guitarist Bim Williams. More here.