The City Council has moved swiftly to bring specific minimum sizes for new build apartments into force across the whole of Manchester, including the city centre and its fringe areas.
The new requirements are in force with immediate effect. They follow the limits that the City has had upon the proportions of one-bed apartments within overall scheme unit mix for some good time now.
To start with, the established London standards are being used (click here for details), although work is already underway to produce a Manchester specific version – which will be consulted upon and adopted as a Manchester Residential Design Guide in due course.
Obviously, residential continues to be big news in the city – with PRS (private rented) leading the way in terms of development interest. Equally clearly, the stating of precise new minimum sizes for each of the normal 1, 2 and 3 bed units has pretty basic implications for those drawing up and costing schemes.
With the current wave of activity in the residential sector, the City Council want to provide developers with clarity about the quality of accommodation that is required to meet the policy objectives.
These standards are new for Manchester, but the push for quality isn't. It will be interesting to see if in practice there will be case by case relaxations, for example to facilitate the delivery of PRS schemes which usually favour studios and one-beds, but which may make up for smaller room sizes through providing additional shared amenity space and hotel type facilities elsewhere in the building. How the standards are applied to the PRS product may well be a key debating point as it has been in London.
Manchester guards its long term future with passion and tenacity. The ability to physically achieve investment in new buildings, as and when market conditions create the opportunity, is clearly a priority, but, as one might say, this has never been 'at any price'.
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