Building Back Better: £70m Southport Theatre rebuild among schemes aiming to regenerate Liverpool City Region

A £70million vision for a revitalised Southport Theatre and Convention Centre is part of an ambitious economic recovery plan for the whole of Liverpool City Region. 

‘Building Back Better’ is published today arguing that £1.4billion investment from the Government would unlock £8.8billion worth of ‘shovel ready’ projects – all of which could begin in the next 12 months. 

The plans by the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority would help communities within the region to recover from the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic. 

They said: “We are planning to replace Southport’s existing theatre and conference centre to add £25million per year to the local economy and catalyse the transformation of the town centre.”

Ian Maher, Leader of Sefton Council, said: “We are pleased that the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority recognises the importance of the Southport Theatre and Convention Centre project to our borough, to the town, and to its economy.

“This builds on our announcements on the project last week, the response to which has been positive.

“We will continue to develop the project to support discussions with potential funding partners, and we are keen to continue conversations with residents and all stakeholders as the project progresses”.

The Building Better plan, published today by Liverpool City Region Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram, sets out the ambition to create 122,000 jobs, including 94,000 permanent jobs and 28,000 jobs in construction. It is supported by leading figures from the worlds of business, academia, the social economy, the public sector and trades union.

An artist’s impression of how the new look Southport Theatre and Convention Centre would look

The plan shows how economic recovery will be delivered, across four strategic themes and with concrete, costed projects and programmes of work.  The four themes – the business ecosystem, people-focused recovery, place, and a green recovery – are all underpinned by a tangible commitment to Build Back Better.  The plan sets out clear asks of Government supported by robust evidence.

The city region has, in the last 10 years, reduced its unemployment rate from well above, to just below, the national level; developed an internationally-popular culture and visitor economy; seen its universities act as major investors and civic leaders; expanded its port; developed a fast growing social economy and progressed internationally-recognised strengths in material science, infectious diseases control and high performance computing.  

Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram said: “This pandemic has rocked us all and we still face tough times ahead, but my ambition to build a globally competitive, environmentally responsible and socially inclusive economy for the whole of our region remains undimmed.

“Before Covid-19, the city region’s growth rate of 3.5% was much higher than national levels, with well-above average productivity growth based on ten years of strong economic progress. We will build on these solid foundations.

“Alongside our strengths, we know that we still face hugely significant underlying challenges in health, education and skills and economic inactivity in our communities. Our recovery plan is focused on tackling these challenges and supporting the people of our city region – tackling inequality, creating jobs, supporting businesses, driving innovation, building new homes, and giving people the skills, they need to fulfil their ambitions.

“The challenge ahead is beyond the capabilities of any one city region, or any one organisation, to deal with alone. It is only by working together, with all of our partners across the city region and with Government, that we will prevail and Build Back Better than ever.”

Building Back Better has identified nearly 40 fully-costed, shovel-ready interventions, which would create more than 120,000 jobs in total.  In addition, the plan details medium and long-term projects that could play a key role in the recovery, including the Mersey Tidal Power project, which would use the city region’s unique assets to contribute to the UK’s long-term sustainable energy mix, while creating thousands of jobs.

Projects include:

Manufacturing Technology Centre’s (MTC) radical innovation of Modern Methods of Construction (£155 million programme), Liverpool

The next stage of MTC’s expansion in the City Region, following a CA funded £15m expansion into rapidly reconfigurable and digital production lines, focuses on innovative excellence in modern methods of construction (MMC).

Glass Futures (£54m project), St Helens

An industry backed Research and Technology Organisation leading collaboration across some of the largest companies in the global glass industry, together with academia and government. Glass manufacturing practices are currently responsible for ~2million tonnes of CO2 per annum in the UK alone and the 90,000 square foot facility will be centred around a 30 tonne/day low carbon demonstration furnace. The project will create the world’s first openly accessible, commercially available, multi-disciplinary glass melting facility with provision for research and development trials to decarbonise the UK glass industry. 

The LCR Hydrogen Economy Programme (>£600m programme), Halton

Liverpool City Region is perfectly positioned to exploit the potential of hydrogen as a path towards a zero-carbon economy. Our strategic advantages include hydrogen production assets and knowledge; large and growing freight and logistics interchange infrastructure to enable ‘destination point’ zero carbon fuelling. This is in addition to our scalable renewable energy generation capacity, which could fuel hydrogen production; significant latent demand for hydrogen for industrial fuel switching; and geology that could provide large volume sub-surface hydrogen storage and similarly carbon capture utilisation and storage within the depleted Irish Sea Gas fields.

Shakespeare North Playhouse (£3m), Knowsley

The Shakespeare North Playhouse is a once in a lifetime project for Knowsley and will celebrate the area’s fascinating links – via the Earls of Derby – to Shakespeare himself.

Currently being built in Prescot, and opening in 2022, it is a flexible theatre with capacity for between 320 and 472 seats and will provide a wide ranging and contemporary programme of events and performances, along with an educational offer to engage and excite young and old.

National Packaging Innovation Centre (NPIC) (£60m project), Wirral

In partnership with Unilever, we are developing plans for an internationally significant, open-access innovation centre focused on the commercialisation of innovative sustainable packaging solutions. If successful the Centre would enable the UK to further anchor itself into the global £1 trillion packaging market.

Building Back Better sets out an evidence based, concerted, responsive and co-ordinated effort to co-design and co-fund an integrated people focussed recovery programme across employment, skills, health and inequality. The LCR proposes to work in partnership with Government on the following programmes:

• A fully funded September Offer for school leavers to have a funded place in education, a job with training, apprenticeship or training programme, with increased levels of bursary funds for providers to respond to needs;
• A young person’s guarantee, ensuring that those aged under 25 who have been out of work for more than 6 months can get training, an apprenticeship or a job: this will require the delivery of substantial numbers of Kickstarter jobs in the City Region;
• Creation of increased numbers of apprenticeships (including degree apprenticeships and with increased focus on digital and agile skills) through incentives for businesses and further flexibilities around use of the apprenticeship levy;
• A clearly evidenced, business led skills programme to deliver recovery as set out in the Association of Colleges Rebuild report;
• A digital skills programme to retrain businesses and workers for an increasingly digital world;
• A national digital poverty programme, which improves access to digital connectivity and devices for those that need it;
• A community and voluntary sector resilience programme which provides the right infrastructure and financial resource for the sector to engage with those impacted by the pandemic (separate to the broader support for social economy through Kindred);
• An enhanced schools catch-up programme to help pupils make up the lost learning, to ensure that young people are not permanently disadvantaged;

A Liverpool City Region creative curriculum to capture the talent of young people in the City Region.
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