Rose Cottage, situated on the historic "Hasty Lane" on the edge of Manchester Airport, is a stunning grade II listed 17th Century dwelling, beautifully maintained by the current tenants, a family of three.I was in meetings for most of yesterday, so didn't have time to send this over, but I've got an important update for the Rose Cottage Campaign.
English Heritage Response
English Heritage (EH) have finally received the report from Manchester Airport's agent, White Young Green (WYG), stating that they will not re-draw the plans to incorporate the cottage into the development. In turn, EH have written a letter to Manchester Planning Department outlining their advice, which I attach to this email. Here's an extract (emphasis mine):
The supplementary statement explains in considerable detail why the applicant believes that the operational requirements of the new development would make the retention of Rose Cottage in situ impractical. It will be important that the City Council satisfies itself on the validity of the arguments set out in the supplementary statement. If the City Council is convinced that these arguments are indeed valid, then it will need to consider whether the new development brings "substantial benefits for the community", which are sufficient to outweigh the loss of a nationally important historic building.The application should be determined on the basis of a careful consideration of the extent to which any community benefits arising from the development proposals can be proven to be sufficiently substantial to outweigh the loss of a nationally important Grade II historic building.
Reading between the lines, EH seem to be suggesting WYG's arguments are both invalid and insufficient As an alternative plan incorporating the Cottage into the development is not forthcoming, then EH now remain in their holding position which is to "strongly recommend refusal". This is pretty strong stuff from EH, which is highly regarded by Manchester City Council.
So what does this mean? If WYG came up with a new plan, incorporating the Cottage in the design, then it may have been easier for the Planning committee to accept the application. This wouldn't be desirable from our point of view as four families would still be made homeless, and the Airport would still grow at an unsustainable rate. I believe it will now be more difficult for the planning committee to accept the application for demolition, on the grounds that EH now "strongly recommend refusal", and it will be difficult to prove that the benefits of demolition will "sufficiently ... outweigh the loss of a nationally important grade II listed building", especially when we're in a recession / depression. Air freight is rapidly receding (see next), not expanding. There are better things to spend £20m on!
Manchester air freight down by 42%
Manchester Airport air freight is in steep declineGeoff Muirhead: If you were to look at air freight and 60% by value of goods that this country imports and exports comes in air freight, air freight's off by 30%. [pause] And I mean that's a reflection of what's happening in the world at large...
Evan Davis: That is a HUGE....
Geoff Muirhead: ...it is, the issue isn't whether we can cope with change, the issue is the pace of change at the moment is unmanageable - and that's what we need to get under control.
The whole argument behind the Rose Cottage demolition is that air freight capacity needs to increase at such a rapid level that we should double it within the next year or so to cope. As is seen in this interview, air freight is actually decreasing, rather than increasing, so the economic argument doesn't stack up.
Manchester freight stats are available on-line: http://www.manchesterairport.co.uk/manweb.nsf/Content/TrafficStatisticsArchive
As you can see, Jan figures show a whopping 42% reduction, compared to the same month last year. Hardly a sustainable argument for doubling air freight capacity. (Thanks to Vanessa Hall from Manchester Greens for pointing me in the right direction)
Now what?
I spoke with Planning again, and enquired about the impact of the EH letter. They told me that they have gone back to the Airport, asking them to come up with an economic justification for the expansion. They said that since EH's advice is to prove that this will bring substantial benefits for the community, they will be asking the Airport to do just that.
Then the planning officer dropped a bombshell - he told me that should the airport not be able to prove this, then he doesn't think the application will go to the committee at all!!
My heart kind of skipped a beat, so I jumped at the chance to really hammer the message home - "I do wonder if the Airport will be able to do this, because speaking frankly, if we are in a recession, or even now a depression, how much Air Freight capacity will we need over the next few years?" and "Do we really want to spend £20m on a white elephant?". The planning officer was unaware it was going to cost £20m, and seemed anxious to agree we "mustn't get this wrong!"
We will now have to wait to see how the Airport responds, and then see how the planning department responds to that response. It seems to me that the application hasn't changed, but the world around it has, as the worsening economic situation lends less credibility to the plan as every day passes.
I think we will have a window of opportunity to hand in a printed version of the petition to MCC between the Airport response and MCC's response - that way we might be able to influence what the planning department recommends. This segways me nicely to....
Petition and Facebook update
Facebook group
As you can see, we've hardly grown in the last 3 weeks. We must, must spread the word further and faster. Please, please, please, forward this email onto your friends and ask them to send it on also. We need to raise awareness further. We've had fairly good media coverage, but we're still under 600 signatures. We're really aiming for 1000, and we need to step up a gear to get that 1000 before the Airport respond to MCC. I will probably send out another email in the next week or two asking for more distribution.
If you've been collecting signatures using the hard copy version of the petition - thank you very much - hugely appreciated. Please make sure these are either sent back to me in the next week or so, or input on-line, as I may need to suddenly submit a paper version of the petition in the afore-mentioned window of opportunity.
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