North Tyneside Council is set to approve a 138-home redevelopment with commercial space on the former Tyne Brand factory site in North Shields. As Place North East reported, officers have recommended it for approval.
Why the timing is interesting
North Tyneside has just failed the government’s Housing Delivery Test, completing 1,504 homes against a need of 2,306, a score of 65%. That is below the 75% threshold, which means the presumption in favour of sustainable development now applies to housing applications in the borough.
So a 138-home brownfield scheme arriving at committee days later is well timed for the applicant. The council needs completions, and it is in a materially weaker position to refuse reasonable housing proposals than it was a month ago.
It is worth being precise about cause and effect though. This application will have been in preparation for a long time and the officer recommendation will rest on the planning merits, not the test result. The test changes the balance in marginal cases and at appeal. It does not turn a bad scheme into a good one.
The site
Tyne Brand was a fish and food canning operation, and the name is still familiar to anyone who grew up on Tyneside. A former food processing works is close to the ideal brownfield housing site: it is within an existing town, connected to services, and its previous use is unlikely to have left the sort of contamination that makes a chemical works or a gasworks prohibitively expensive to clean.
Adding commercial space alongside the homes is the right instinct in North Shields, which has spent years rebuilding around the Fish Quay and needs employment and activity as well as bedrooms.
What we do not know
The published detail does not give the tenure split, the developer’s identity, the value, or the timescale. On a 138-home scheme the affordable provision is the number that would tell you most, and it is worth asking for at committee.
The pattern across the North East
Put this alongside the other North East housing news this fortnight: 507 student beds proposed at Hadrian House in Newcastle, and the Tyneside delivery test failures. The direction is consistent. Urban Tyneside is largely built out, so its housing has to come from recycling sites that used to make or process something.
That is harder and slower than building on fields, and it is also the only way these boroughs hit their numbers without eating into green belt. Every Tyne Brand that gets converted is a small piece of the answer to a delivery test failure. It takes a lot of them.
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