A legal battle could see regeneration schemes in Liverpool ‘paralysed’ if heritage campaigners win.
Neptune and SAVE Britain’s Heritage are gearing up for a court-based clash this week and ahead of the hearing the Liverpool-based company issued a warning.
Neptune say the legal challenge to their planning consent for the £35 million redevelopment scheme, which includes the Futurist cinema, has the potential to “paralyse” then planning process and stall the regeneration of Liverpool is their court claim is successful.
SAVE insist the warning is “nonsense” and said that Neptune are “bent on fighting the court case in the media in advance of the court hearing”.
According to Neptune, SAVE’s court challenge, which will he heard next week in the Court of Appeal is based on a claim that Liverpool planners should have referred the planning application to the DCMS and UNESCO because the area relating to the planning permission sits within the “Buffer Zone of Liverpool’s World Heritage Site”
Neptune Managing Director, Steve Parry, said: “Last year there were more than 600 planning applications within the WHS Buffer Zone in Liverpool. Each and every one of these applications should, according to SAVE, be referred to the Governments Department of Culture Media and Sport and then on to UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee for consideration. However, this Committee sits only once a year and is responsible for over a thousand WHS’s across the globe.”
“This is why the practical protection of such sites is entrusted to a local level where there are UNESCO approved management plans and policies in place. In this case the planning authority and Historic England were satisfied that this application did not have any impact on the WHS and actually enhanced a seriously derelict and rundown gateway to the city.”