FORMER Housing Minister Grant Shapps accidentally signed off Liverpool's Welsh Streets regeneration project without realising it would destroy the house in which Ringo Starr was born, a court was told yesterday.
Number 9 Madryn Street, in Dingle, was set to be bulldozed by Liverpool City Council alongside 400 other terraced homes off Park Road.
But yesterday the High Court heard that the Conservative Party chairman had not been told that the house would be demolished, nor, it was claimed, another 5,000 terraces around the country, when he announced a £35.5 million regeneration project last November.
The money was earmarked for 13 of the areas worst hit by the closure of the £2.25 billion HMR programme, including Liverpool.
At the time, Shapps boasted that the grants were the antithesis to Labour's Pathfinder policy which, he sais, was rooted in the demolition of the “classic English terraced house”.
However it later emerged the grants would be used to fund exactly that and councils were intending to spend around 98 per cent of the money on demolition.
Heritage campaigners argued this was not the original purpose of the fund and it flew in the face of Coalition policy to protect historic terraces. They called for a full judicial review and yesterday, after Government lawyers admitted the money was allocated unlawfully, it was granted by Mrs Justice Lang.
Stealth
The Government had argued against the review, saying it would be impossible to claw the money back because too much of it had already been spent or committed by the councils.
Government barrister James Eadie QC said it would be "legally extremely problematic, if possible at all" to unravel the payments which had not been "ring-fenced".
Save Britain’s Heritage said that the regeneration project amounted to a continuation of “Pathfinder by stealth” and its barrister, Richard Harwood, said the wrongly allocated grants should either be recouped from the councils or a condition imposed that they be spent on refurbishing properties.
Marcus Binney, SAVE's President, later said the ruling “opens the door towards one of the most important and productive regeneration schemes in Britain, with renovation of thousands of empty homes and local landmark buildings".
In June, after something of an outcry, Shapps hot-footed it to Liverpool to reprieve 9 Madryn St, calling it a “beacon of Beatlemania”. Some homes on the street were spared, but another 400 are still earmarked for demolition.
Welsh Street campaigners have put forward alternative designs to make do and mend the existing properties.
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