A high-rise development in the centre of Exeter which was to have featured dozens of affordable homes aimed at key workers will now include none at all.
Developers working on the ‘ghost town’ boarded-up Harlequins shopping centre won’t have to provide the affordable homes they pledged when planning permission was granted three years ago.
Instead they will hand Exeter City Council millions of pounds to build affordable homes somewhere else.
The city’s planning committee heard that an independent valuer had deemed that the project would not be viable for the developer if it had to provide affordable homes. And councillors were also told that if they didn’t agree to the change in arrangements, the ‘co-living’ development would not go ahead at all.
The committee agreed it had little choice but to agree to the change, but Cllr Anne Jobson (Con, St Loyes) said the council was being ‘held hostage’ by Guernsey-based developer Curlew Alternatives Property.
“My suspicions are that co-living will end up as student living in due course, and Exeter won’t see any benefit from it,” she said.
“This developer has dilly-dallied around ever since planning permission was given, and one suspects they had every intention of going down this route from the very beginning.
“This should be tied up as tightly as possible legally, so this developer cannot easily squirm their way out of doing what they should have done in the first place – either sell the site on to somebody who does want to develop it, or get on with developing it themselves.”
The shopping centre has been branded a ‘ghost town’ since its businesses closed down.
It first opened in 1987 and was intended to be an American-style ‘mall’ of 32 shops with a pedestrian bridge to the Guildhall shopping centre next door.
But developer Curlew bought it in 2018 and announced plans to turn it into co-living accommodation and a hotel instead. After the hotel plans were abandoned, permission was given three years ago for the mall to be knocked down and replaced with two blocks of flats and studios. The blocks would be six and seven storeys, and would have a total of 378 rooms.
Permission was given on the basis that 20 per cent of the homes – around 75 of them – would be affordable units for private rent, but now Curlew has come back to the council to say the scheme is not viable to deliver on that basis.
An independent auditor agrees, and blames rising construction costs, falling property values and higher interest rates.
Now, instead of building the affordable homes on the Harlequin site, Curlew will give the council up to £7.5 million to spend on building them elsewhere. It will pay £1 million when demolition begins, another £1 million when building starts and the rest later.
Cllr Diana Moore (Green, St Davids) said the development, which had been the first approved for co-living in the city, had been a ‘disaster’ for Exeter.
She went on: “In 2021 it was seen as an important landmark, and the affordable housing element was a really crucial part of the approval. At the time, key workers were being lauded for their role during the pandemic – how things change!
“Now the options for single young people are dwindling and expensive. If we have the courage to say no to this, a better scheme may result.”
And Cllr Michael Mitchell (Lib Dem, Duryard and St James) added: “This is almost a get-out-of-jail-free card for the developer.
“We have no guarantee that this developer is going to carry this development forward. By agreeing this, we are making it a more attractive site to sell on to somebody else.”
No representative from the developers spoke at the meeting.