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Hello,
Rising up like an enormous glacier among a sea of Victorian buildings, the Northern Quarter’s new skyscraper is raising some eyebrows.
The controversial 16-storey glass tower, developed by billionaire bookie Fred Done's construction firm Salboy for use as offices, has been dubbed the ‘Shudehill Shard’? It certainly looks very different to the buildings nestled next to it - not least the 280-year-old Lower Turk's Head pub.
Photographer Carl Thompson tweeted a picture of the development alongside the Sesame Street lyrics 'One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn't belong'. Joseph Holt brewery, which runs the Turk's Head, replied with a ‘side eyes’ emoji.
The tower has been the subject of a long-running planning battle, with critics saying it didn't fit in with the Northern Quarter's surroundings. A petition drew hundreds of signatures but plans were approved in 2019 after several previous applications were knocked back.
On to the news. Amendments to the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill were being discussed in the Commons as we published this newsletter - we’ll be discussing what was said. We’ll also be looking at a development in the Oldham Coliseum story and controversy over the Levelling Up bids.
Awaab’s Law ‘will prevent further tragedies’
Changes known as ‘Awaab’s Law’ will prevent tragedies like two-year-old Awaab Ishak’s death, a senior minister has said.
MPs have been debating the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill’s report stage in the Commons today, following amendments put forward by housing secretary Michael Gove in memory of the Rochdale toddler.
Communities minister Dehenna Davison said the legislation is designed specifically to ensure that ‘terrible cases’ like that of Awaab - who died from a respiratory condition caused by mould in his home - and the Grenfell United community do not happen again.
“Within Government we’re well aware that unfortunately damp and mould are not the only hazard in homes that can pose a threat to social residents’ health, for example, excess cold and falls caused by disrepair… are also among the top five hazards in homes in England,” she told the Commons.
Ms Davison said Awaab’s Law addresses those concerns and enables the government to introduce new requirements on landlords to act on a broader range of hazards. She said changes to the Bill will ‘impel landlords to deal with hazards’ such as damp and mould in a timely fashion and improve professional standards.
But Labour say the Bill will not, as drafted, ‘meaningfully empower tenants’. Labour has tabled amendments and a new clause which would ‘ensure that tenants are adequately represented’ on the advisory panel.
Shadow communities minister Matthew Pennycook said the Bill should ensure all social housing providers are subject to inspections by the regulator regardless of size. “There is no evidence to suggest that landlords with fewer than 1,000 homes are less likely to fail their tenants,” he said.
Salford and Eccles MP Rebecca Long-Bailey stressed the need for regulations which ensure landlords have to remedy hazards like mould and damp ‘in a timely fashion’.
She said social housing providers need to be subject to freedom of information requests to ensure transparency. “Without this amendment, social housing providers can and have refused to be transparent in relation to important elements of their business practices, even though they are receiving public money through rent and support,” she said.
Ms Long-Bailey also asked for an equivalent Awaab’s Law for the private rented sector, quoting Citizens Advice figures which suggest more than half of private renters in England struggle with damp and mould or excessive cold.
“Private renters don’t have access to the housing ombudsman for their complaints to be investigated independently. And so millions of suffering families have no voice, they are trapped and they are living in homes that would ultimately put their lives at risk,” she said.
Chief constable says there is 'far too much knife crime' in region
Stephen Watson says there is 'far too much knife crime' in Greater Manchester.
Greater Manchester Police’s chief constable told BBC Radio Manchester knife crime is ‘at a high level’ but is ‘not disproportionately a high level for a place of our size’.
Responding to a Manchester Evening News article about the problem, the chief constable said his force has a broad preventative approach. “You also need old-fashioned boots on the ground and to stop and search people asking them to turn out their pockets,” he claimed.
“Then when you find people in possession of knives you need to lock them up and that is what we are doing,” he said, pointing to a ‘264 per cent increase’ in stop and searches and a ‘doubling’ in arrests since the beginning of his tenure.
Vice-chancellor to step down
Dame Nancy Rothwell will step down as vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester next summer.
Professor Rothwell - the first woman to lead the university - has been President and Vice-Chancellor since 2010. She will leave when her current contact comes to an end in the summer of 2024, the institution has confirmed.
Philippa Hird, chair of UoM’s board of governors, said the university continues to develop as ‘a world-leading centre of teaching and learning excellence, a research powerhouse’ and is ‘setting new standards for social responsibility’ under Dame Rothwell’s leadership.
Prof Rothwell’s tenure has been peppered with controversy over the last couple of years.
A number of protests centering on Covid lockdown measures took place during the pandemic and pictures of students tearing down fencing at Owen’s Park made national headlines following a protest over the uni's decision to ‘pen them in’ during the pandemic.
And she was forced to apologise when she appeared on Newsnight and falsely claimed she had contacted an alleged victim of a racial profiling incident on campus.
In September, freshers said they felt ‘disrespected’ by a housing crisis which saw some new students offered accommodation in Liverpool, Preston, or Huddersfield.
Meanwhile, the ‘UoM Rent Strike’ argument has been rumbling on and culminated last month when protesters barricaded themselves inside key uni buildings - including the John Owens offices, where the vice-chancellor works.
Councillors battle for red wall seat
Three colleagues will go head-to-head in a battle to contest a key ‘red wall’ constituency at the next General Election.
Rochdale councillors Elsie Blundell, Iram Faisal and Liam O’Rourke have all made the Labour longlist for Heywood and Middleton. They are joined by Coun Azhar Ali,who is currently leader of Lancashire County Council’s Labour group.
Heywood and Middleton is currently held by Chris Clarkson, who became the constituency’s first ever Conservative MP in 2019. As local democracy reporter Nick Statham reports, Labour will no doubt see the area as a key election battleground.
He has spoken to the four hopefuls about why they want to represent the constituency.
'Guaranteed to fail'
There was understandable disappointment when Greater Manchester missed out on more than £276m of Levelling Up money in January.
Three bids were successful, bringing nearly £60m to Trafford, Wigan and Oldham. But Bolton made two bids for a combined £40m for town centre redevelopment and road improvements. They were rejected in the latest round.
Now leaders in the borough have claimed many of our region’s bids were 'guaranteed to fail' because the government changed the selection criteria after applications had been received.
Applications for the fund were oversubscribed and ministers at the department for Levelling Up changed the criteria and deselected many bids from the North West as the area had 'exceeded its allocation' of cash grants in previous years, local democracy reporter Chris Gee writes.
Ministers also made the decision - after bids had been lodged with them - to limit any successful schemes to one per authority and take account of those areas which had received previous levelling up fund cash.
The Municipal Journal estimates that councils across the country spent around £27m in submitting bids for Levelling Up funding with around 80 per cent of projects later rejected. Nationally, just 111 schemes out of 529 applied for were approved.
Bolton Council leader Martyn Cox told a recent meeting it was 'odd that you would set up a levelling up system where for every winner you have four losers'. The Conservative group leader pledged to deliver a message to ministers that he was 'not a great fan in the way the government is approaching this'.
Labour opposition leader Nick Peel said most bids from the region were 'guaranteed to fail' and called the changing of criteria 'an outrageous way to treat local authorities'.
Dehenna Davison, parliamentary under-secretary of state for Levelling Up, said the government had around £8.8bn of bids but only £2.1bn to allocate. "Right at the beginning fo the fund we made it clear that there are technical considerations including geographic spread which is very important to us to make sure levelling up is for everyone,” she said on a visit to Bury last week.
‘Not the responsibility of the council’
So it looks like a new £24.5m theatre in Oldham will be built. But it’s not known if the Coliseum will survive to actually run it when it opens in three years.
As Charlotte Green reports, plans for the new space to replace the historic Coli were greenlit by the council’s cabinet on Monday. They also formally accepted £1.84m of Arts Council England money for cultural activity in Oldham for the next three years.
Council leader Amanda Chadderton said ensuring the survival of the Coliseum was ‘not the responsibility of the council’ following a protest outside the chamber by members of Equity.
Coliseum bosses say the theatre will close permanently at the end of the month after being dropped from the Arts Council funding portfolio. Town hall chiefs want to open a new, smaller, ‘more modern’ theatre at 84 Union Street, in the Old Post Office and former Quaker Meeting House.
Coun Chadderton told the meeting any new theatre must be sustainable and financially viable, meaning ‘its operator has to make money all year round and not just from one production a year’. “I don’t want to be sat here in ten years time because the new theatre was not financially viable - we have to look at a new model. Theatres have to evolve and they have to change,” she said.
She said the plan had always been for the Coliseum to vacate the Fairbottom Street theatre due to a ‘growing list of maintenance issues’. A council report states that it has cost the authority £20k a year for a decade to keep up with the maintenance and ensure it remains compliant with health and safety regulations.
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Weather etc
- Wednesday: Overcast changing to sunny intervals by late morning. 8C.
- Road closures: M67 Eastbound entry slip road closed due to long-term roadworks at J2 St Annes Road ( Denton ). Until 1st December 2025.
- A627 Dowson Road Northbound, Hyde, closed due to water main work from Thornley Street to B6468 Market Street. Until 3rd March.
- A669 Lees Road, Oldham, in both directions closed due to emergency water main repairs between B6194 Cross Street and The Fire Station. Until 2nd March.
Manchester headlines
- New neighbourhood: A developer has unveiled plans to demolish a large part of Regent Retail Park in Salford to create a huge new inner-city neighbourhood. Most of the current stores including Costa Coffee, TX Maxx, Home Bargains, and Boots would be demolished under the proposals. In their place 10 new apartment blocks and a five-acre park could be built, Henley Investment Management, which bought the shopping centre for £16m in 2020, said. If planning permission is approved the stores will remain open until 2026, when the current lease expires. More here.
- Queues: Manchester Museum saw more than 50,000 visitors through its doors during its reopening week. Pictures of queues of people heading to the beloved attraction were shared on social media last week. The fact many schools were on half term helped bolster numbers, with 52,000 people in all heading to the Oxford Road institution. The museum has been closed since 2021, when it shut its doors to embark on a huge £15 million refit. A completely new wing and two-floor extension has been built, along with its new permanent South Asia gallery and the Chinese Culture gallery.
- Covid: Hundreds of hospital patients in Manchester currently have Covid. According to the latest data, 423 patients at NHS hospitals across the city had Covid last week. Two of these patients at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust hospitals required mechanical ventilation to help them breathe. It comes after the trust which runs North Manchester General, Manchester Royal Infirmary and Wythenshawe Hospital faced unprecedented pressure during the pandemic. However, speaking to councillors last week, group director of strategy Darren Banks said the number of Covid patients in hospital now is comparable to the peak of the pandemic. More here.
Registration: The families of Chloe Rutherford and Liam Curry - the young couple killed in the Manchester Arena terror attack - have told of their anguish at a law that prevents them from registering the deaths of their children. Almost six years on from their deaths, their mothers Lisa Rutherford and Caroline Curry say they have been unable to complete the 'final act a parent can do for their child' by registering their deaths. That's because the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 states that when a death has been subject to an inquest the information for the registration can only be provided by the coroner. In other cases, the information is provided by a "qualified informant" which is usually a family member. The Manchester Arena Inquiry, which was launched to investigate the deaths of the victims of the Manchester Arena attack, has been ongoing since September 2020.
Worth a read
Court reporter Amy Walker has been looking at the extraordinary story of Zholia Alemi - a bogus psychiatrist who faked a degree to forge her 20-year career.
Alemi falsified the certificate, along with a letter of verification riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, before submitting it to the General Medical Council (GMC) to register as a qualified doctor.
She was somehow accepted and over the last 20 years worked in various positions all over the country, including Manchester. Alemi is estimated to have fraudulently obtained over £1 million through the NHS.
She was this week jailed for seven years after being found guilty of 20 offences following a month-long trial at Manchester Crown Court.
You can read the full details here.
That's all for today
Thanks for joining me. If you have stories you would like us to look into, email beth.abbit@menmedia.co.uk.
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