UKREiiF | Q&A with Cllr Paul Drake-Davis
Place Yorkshire spoke with the cabinet member for regeneration and housing in Hull, to find out where the council will be developing next and its ambitions for the region under its first Mayor.
What are you promoting here at UKREiiF? What are you pushing out to the market?
Yesterday we officially signed the agreement with ECF for the East Bank development, which we’ve been working on for two years. The last two trips to UKREiiF have been about that, so we’re glad that’s done, but now we’re pushing forward with other development sites in Hull city centre.
We’re developing a new city centre vision and previewing that on our stand at UKREiiF, and that’s bringing forward several new development sites. Our main focus is around the land next to the Connexin Live arena, where the staples building is. We’re trying to bring that one to development next, so hopefully we can speak to interested parties and see how we can bring that forward.
And what are the main challenges that Hull needs to overcome?
I think the last few years is has been about bringing people to Hull and showing them what’s already there. A lot of people have an idea about Hull in their heads, and then they’re quietly surprised when they come and see how glorious it is, and and what opportunity there is there.
Hull is a city with a lot of opportunity to do great urban regeneration, and the main barrier at the moment, I think, is probably still investor confidence. Building in Hull is quite an expensive business compared to other parts of the UK. We have to deal with higher levels of flood protection, which will add to the costs. There’s notorious ground conditions in Hull, where you have to pile very deeply, so there’s a lot of abnormals and a high cost before anything raises out of the ground.
For us, when we speak to investors or developers, one of the barriers is that funding gap, the viability gap in developments. But, we’re confident we can make a good case for what we want to do. East Bank is an example of that: Homes England came on board, there was some devolution, brownfield money from before.
Now we’ve got the Mayoral Combined Authority and the Mayor in place, we can hopefully get more brownfield funding to help de-risk all these sites, and make them ready for regeneration, redevelopment.
How do you think the new Mayor will impact development going forward?
One of the blockers we have, is a high housing target of 993 new homes a year, which was about 500 previously. But Hull has tight administrative boundaries and we don’t have much empty land left, so we’re going to have to focus on trying to achieve that target by building on brownfield land.
Hopefully with the Mayor in place, and the extra funding that position can bring from from central government, we’ll get extra funding to de-risk brownfield land – which we’ve got plenty of. I’m sure we can have a real good go at reaching that target.
Even Angela Rayner said she knows that these targets are very ambitious, but Hull will give it its best shot to try and meet it. We’ve got the ambition, got the determination: we just need that little bit of help from the government to get these brownfield sites up and running.
And if you could wave a magic wand, what would be your wish for Hull?
Well, I’m always a keen advocate of the phrase ‘transport-led regeneration’. I think you’ll find that a common theme in a lot of cities and regions is improving infrastructure.
So for Hull and East Yorkshire, it would obviously be improving connections into the region, so rail electrification all the way to Hull would be amazing.
We also want to follow the ambitions of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority and develop a mass transit plan for for Hull and the East riding region. We have congestion problems, like a lot of cities, and we need to improve our public transport.
So, more funding for improving our local transport network. That will be one of the things that will help us go on this regeneration journey and help build the houses that we need for our people.
