Portsmouth super-peninsula plans 'dead', despite £20m spend
The controversial project was paused earlier this year
Last updated 11th Feb 2022
Councillors have ‘moved on’ from the controversial £1bn ‘super peninsula’ project and are working on alternative plans to replace the thousands of new homes it would have provided, the leader of Portsmouth City Council has said.
So far the council has spent £20m on the scheme, which would have seen a futuristic development built on reclaimed land.
Two senior members of the Lennox Point project team resigned from their positions in recent weeks in a further sign progress on the scheme has stalled.
But opposition councillors, who are against the plan, have warned it is ‘still not completely off the table’ and have urged the council’s cabinet to formally abandon it.
Council leader Gerald Vernon-Jackson, who described the scheme as ‘dead’, said he was concerned the council homes due to be built on the reclaimed land might not be replaced elsewhere.
‘There would be 1,000 Portsmouth families unable to access affordable homes,’ he said. ‘We will have to find space for those homes we will no longer be able to build and we can’t guarantee there will be as many social homes at other sites.
‘But if councillors don’t want Lennox Point – and it seems as though they don’t – then it won’t happen. We do need alternatives though.’
He said failure to produce a ‘compliant’ Local Plan that hit the 17,700-home housing target could see the council stripped of its planning powers and that that would lead to the loss of ‘all the protections we have on our green space’.
However, councillor Rob New, a Conservative member of the council planning committee, said this did not need to be the case.
‘There’s been a lot of smoke and mirrors from the administration about what is happening but one simple option they seem to be avoiding is to go to the government and request the housing target is renewed,’ he said. ‘There are mechanisms the council can use to avoid the need for this sort of inappropriate housing.’
His committee and group colleague, councillor Terry Norton, said the council had been slow to produce the new planning blueprint and criticised the decision to oppose housing schemes in the city, including at St James’ Hospital, which would havecontributed to housing numbers.
‘We know we need to build homes in Portsmouth and we know that’s not always easy,’ he said. ‘But this administration has made planning a political football rather than focusing on dealing with the issue.’
Cal Corkery, the Labour group spokesman for housing whose full council motion in October forced the project to be ‘paused and rethought’, said councillors were being kept ‘in the dark’.
He said the Lennox Point scheme would have been environmentally ‘devastating’ and that it did not include enough affordable housing with the potential for other sites to cater for greater numbers.
‘Only 15 per cent of the homes would have been for affordable rent, for a council project that’s really poor,’ he said. ‘We don’t yet have any details on what other sites might produce but if the council is acting as developer and developing council land then that figure has to be much higher.’
And he urged the council to formally remove the Lennox Point plans from the table.
‘We haven’t seen a cabinet report on the super peninsula project since 2020, so as far as we’re concerned it’s still their policy,’ he said. ‘Until it is brought back to cabinet and another decision is made to scrap it, it does remain an option and we won’t settle until that’s no longer the case.’
Development at Tipner West is still expected to go ahead but under the more limited ambitions of the £50m City Deal agreed in 2014. This will see existing land converted into housing and new space created for businesses.
A cross-party working group of councillors has been meeting to consider the future of the site and Local Plan proposals but Cllr Vernon-Jackson said it did not support pursuing Lennox Point. Both Cllr New and Norton echoed this position.
Any decision to scrap the Lennox Point scheme will see the council lose £20m it has already spent on the project and is thought to have added an extra six months to the publication of its new Local Plan.
‘Lennox Point was an expensive vanity project that was probably never going to happen and has only led to further delays.’ Cllr Norton said.
Plans to reclaim land from the harbour were highly controversial, with opposition being jointly led on environmental grounds by Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust and the RSPB who spearheaded a 24,000-signature petition against it.
David Allwright, speaking on behalf of both organisations at a city council meeting last month, said it was ‘one of the worst projects we’ve had to deal with’.
‘This is a SSSI, SPA protected habitat of the utmost value,’ he said. ‘It is one of the most highly protected and designated bits of habitat in England. These designations are not given out lightly and should not be thrown out lightly.’
New Forest-based naturalist Chris Packham also publicly condemned the proposal which he said ‘could open the floodgates for concreting over protected sites across the country’.
In December a report outlining the details of the project, produced at the request of councillors, was published which said land reclamation was the ‘strongest option’ for any development of the Tipner West site, making it more financially viable. It also said the project would lead to ‘net biodiversity gains’.
Despite this, several councillors have publicly called for the project to be dropped from the Local Plan entirely.