Here is a story that says more about how local government funds itself than it does about industrial property. Portsmouth City Council has won planning permission for a 98,000 sq ft industrial unit in Birchwood, Warrington, on the site of a former Mercedes-Benz truck and van dealership. As Place North West reported, the scheme passed with no objections from statutory consultees.
The scheme itself
The site is 4.71 acres on Leacroft Road, previously the Mercedes-Benz-Roanza dealership, now cleared to hardstanding with boundary tree lines retained. The new building is called The Enza Building, designed by architect AEW, with Hive Land & Planning advising on planning and a long list of consultants including Eddisons, Cundall, Hydrock and Pick Everard. The planning reference at Warrington Council is 2025/01425/FULM.
Why a Hampshire council owns Warrington land
This is the part worth understanding. Councils across England have spent the last decade buying commercial property, often well outside their own boundaries, to generate rental income that plugs the gap left by cuts to central government funding. Warrington itself became notorious for the practice in reverse. Now a south coast authority is developing industrial space in Birchwood because the yields work and the North West logistics market is strong.
The two ways to read it
Read it positively and it is a straightforward vote of confidence. Institutional money, and a council treasury team is institutional money, has looked at the Warrington industrial market and decided a speculative 98,000 sq ft unit will let. Birchwood sits on the M62 corridor with Manchester one way and Liverpool the other, and demand for mid-box industrial space in that corridor has held up better than almost any other asset class in the North.
Read it less positively and it is another reminder that the returns generated on Northern land increasingly flow somewhere else. The rent from The Enza Building will help fund services in Portsmouth. The jobs, the business rates and the actual economic activity stay in Warrington, which is not nothing, but the ownership does not.
What it should tell Northern councils
Mostly this: the assets on your patch are good enough that authorities from the other end of the country are buying them. If a Hampshire council can see the numbers on a Birchwood shed, the case for Northern authorities and Northern pension funds taking positions in their own local industrial market is not a difficult one to make. The land is here. The demand is here. The question is who ends up holding the freehold.
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