LIVERPOOL City Council’s decision to approve planning permission for a 228,000 sq ft office complex at 30 Pall Mall was inevitable.

Of course the council would give the scheme the go-ahead. Why would it not, especially given that the Pall Mall area already forms part of the city’s commercial district?

The approval gives the city an improved chance of winning some or all of the 5,000 Ministry of Justice jobs earmarked to move out of Whitehall to the provinces. That said, actual construction of the building would enhance our chances even further.

The approval of the scheme comes in the same week as the council’s planning department made 17 staff redundant due to the lack of major commercial schemes. The redundancies suggest that local developers are still deep in hibernation, biding their time until the economic freeze turns to thaw.

That would make West Bay Capital’s Pall Mall scheme all the more important. It would allow a sense of impetus to return to the city’s office market.

However, planning permission is not the be all and end all for schemes like this. Money is.
This scheme will be an interesting test of the tightness of the banks’ purse strings in current conditions. What will it take for those strings to loosen a bit?

One big uncertainty is next year’s looming General Election.

If, or should that be when, the Conservatives come to power, will they proceed with the plan to ship civil servants out of central London? Of course, it makes long- term financial sense to do so, but it could also be expensive in the short term with relocation, recruitment, training and redundancy payments to those staff staying put in London.

LIVERPOOL city centre has benefited from billions of pounds of regeneration investment spent on it during recent years.

As a result, the place has been hugely spruced up. Hundreds of projects, some big, some small, have contributed to the physical transformation of buildings, roads and footpaths all over town.

Yet, despite all of the hard work on the appearance of the place, it is still possible to be out for a drink in Liverpool on a Sunday night and to be clubbed across the head with a iron bar. That’s what happened to trainee police officer James Parkes because, we are told, he was gay.

The incident led some gay people to voice fears that Liverpool could be more homophobic than other towns and cities, though hate crimes crop up in other places, too.

As a schoolboy in 1970s, it was common to hear the phrase “you’re gay” used as an insult. What surprised me was that 25 years later, when I took my own children to school, I could still hear the phrase used in exactly the same way.

In some families, the use of offensive language, together with the ugly values it betrays, has passed from one unreconstructed generation to the next. Has there been no progress?

Intolerance has also been witnessed in the form of racist attacks; the murder of teenager Anthony Walker being the most obvious local example.

If a place is to change, then everything about it must change, not just surface things. Instead of physical regeneration, there needs to be a new emphasis on social change. Regenerating minds and souls is the big challenge for the next decade.