Newcastle City Council - Newbiggin Hall

 “I think sometimes it's about not relying on the market itself. Sometimes you must take the lead as the authority. If we're going to do this, we need to ensure that it is done and not half-fiinished or half-baked. It’s about taking leadership and putting our money where our mouth is...” (Housing Officer)

• Newbiggin Hall is a housing estate located in the north-east of Newcastle. Its neighbourhood Centre had been in serious decline, with more than half of the shop units closed. Redevelopment of the site involved replacing a partially vacant parade of small shops, associated parking, and low-grade open space with new retail units and new dwellings.

• The renewal of the local retail offer and the diversification of the housing choice has been an aspiration of the local authority for many years.

• A brief was produced for a masterplan to be created. The project is now being delivered through Newcastle City Council’s municipal housing company, financed through the Housing Revenue Account with additional finance from Homes England and the North of Tyne Combined Authority.

• The process has been managed by the Housing Investment Team working with Planning. Planning has played a key role in providing the detailed development framework for the site, ensuring that the build is of the expected quality and coordinating specialist inputs to ensure delivery

Planning

• Planning provided a development framework by producing an indicative master plan. This identifies the spatial opportunities and the broad aims and objectives of redeveloping the site to include a mix of housing and retail uses.
• Planning facilitates on-site delivery through pre-application discussions with developers. This ensures the appropriate mix of uses, high design quality and other material considerations are discussed and negotiated to ensure the viability of the development.
• Planning ensures conformity to the agreed scheme through planning conditions.
• During the planning application determination process, the planning team manages stakeholder inputs, including liaison with consultees, including members and the community.

 Key planning tools

• The Newbiggin Hall master plan provides a framework that informed the initial marketing of the site, appointment of a developer and delivery. It specified (in broad terms) the requirements for the site in respect of the mix of uses, site layout, open space, flood risk, design excellence, highway works, landscape and ecology.

Site identification

• Newbiggin Hall (neighbourhood) was designated as a Local Centre and a Growth Centre (i.e., targeted for development of new houses) in the Local Plan (comprising the Core Strategy and Urban Core Plan for Gateshead and Newcastle upon Tyne 2010 to 2030).
• The scheme presented an opportunity to replace vacant retail units and unviable housing with modern fit-for-purpose new homes, a new retail store and affordable homes.
• Market confidence was boosted by an earlier phase of new affordable dwellings – 12 family houses and one bungalow - on the adjoining site, that was delivered in 2018.

Site viability

• The principal constraint of development at Newbiggin Hall is adverse ground conditions, specifically problems related to historic mining activity.
• Additional problems (including asbestos presence) became apparent during the demolition process.
• These have been remediated in part with monies from the North of Tyne Combined Authority, making possible the development of new homes.

Leadership and governance

• Newbiggin Hall required a multi-disciplinary approach to deliver the development. It has been led by the Council at corporate level and funded by Housing Investment. It has required multiple specialist inputs including planning, to deliver the development.
• The local authority proactively intervened to deliver aspects of the development. The authority eventually delivered the scheme itself through direct municipal provision.
• Elected members played a key role in the liaison with the local community and ensuring that planning officers followed up on the concerns of the community. They made sure that key stakeholders did what they said they were going to do. “It was key for us to control communications …  local members will be right on to us… So, they played a pivotal role in that” (Planning Officer).

Key lessons

• Having clearly defined outcomes for the development. Being clear about the outcomes, what is being delivered and how, helps to steer the development and keep things on track. “The key thing was identifying what we wanted…  whether it was an assisted living block or … a dementia care facility … or whether it was just ‘we want 25% affordable housing’…that mix was dependent upon the area for which we were working”. (Housing Officer).

• Having a masterplan provides a clear planning framework for the site. This has informed all stages of the planning process, from procurement to development management. “It's not a detailed master plan for the area… keeping it very simple to concept statements and ideas…developed in conjunction with internal colleagues, whether that be transport, flood authority… assessing the application they've helped form … and from a very early stage identify the opportunities of a site and trying to lead the developer to maximize their opportunities” (Planning Officer).
  
   
• Front-loading the site investigation process. The principal challenge in developing the Newbiggin Hall has been viability caused by poor ground conditions, many of which only became apparent as the scheme progressed. This underlines the importance of front-loading and resourcing the site investigation process. This is something the authority have learned from this development and embedded in their processes.

“Bringing sites forward… we need to make sure there's sufficient money put in up front to test these different scenarios… doing a lot more site investigations, intrusive surveys… so we start to front load that end of the system. That (information) is released - here's our idea of a master plan concept statement, here's our site investigation etc.… so all that information goes out as one package so the developer knows what they're bidding on” (Housing Officer).

• Retaining expertise in-house. The development has been expedited efficiently, in no small part, due to the accumulated expertise of brownfield regeneration, retained in-house, and the relationships built up with external partners.

“We’re already an investment partner with Homes England. We've been delivering schemes in partnership with Homes England for over 10 years, and we know about taking commuted sums from the big developers on their large private developments and how we use that. So, we have got the expertise and the structures in place” (Housing Officer).

• Cross-departmental working. “A big learning…close collaboration… a good thing has been the close working relationships to planning, ecology, the flood survey … everyone's been willing to come together for meetings as and when required” (Housing Officer).