PEEL Holdings will shortly submit a revised planning application for its Liverpool Waters scheme.

We have heard much said about how the company has made big concessions to the heritage lobby, scaling back the original ambitious plan by replacing some of the proposed very tall skyscrapers with some medium-rise 15-storey buildings.

English Heritage and other campaigners have argued that the original scheme was harmful to views of Liverpool’s World Heritage Status waterfront.

There have been many meetings between Peel, heritage groups and Liverpool City Council to debate the issue and Peel now says enough is enough.

It is, of course, no surprise that Peel has compromised on its original plan. It was ridiculously ambitious. It envisaged as many as 50,000 people eventually moving to the north docks. That’s more than 10% of the city’s population and would have had a severely distorting effect on the city’s property market.

In my opinion, Peel had never any intention of proceeding with their first plan. The company put it forward as a negotiating tactic in the knowledge that it would inevitably have to scale back whatever plan it put forward as its opening gambit. The revised plan is closer to what Peel really needs to make the scheme work. At the same time, the company can now also say it has taken heritage issues into account. Whereas, if Peel had submitted the scaled- back version as its original plan, it would have had to compromise on that, possibly making the project less viable.

There is much to be admired about the Pier Head, but we must not let conservation for conservation’s sake stand in the way of progress. Nobody is suggesting demolishing the Royal Liver Building. Peel’s plan is about bringing back to use land that has been economically idle for decades. The land is located a couple of miles to the north of the heritage site, a safe distance. The fact that the company is prepared to invest in this part of Liverpool at all is a minor miracle in its own right.

Nevertheless, despite the fact Peel now says it won’t agree to any further concessions, I suspect they will.

PEEL had better be allowed to make the most of its dockside property portfolio, because the company’s port operations are looking a bit slow at the moment.

Despite the official end to the recession, the Port of Liverpool suffered a 7% fall in trade during the first six months of 2010, according to official figures published by the Department for Transport.

The figures are surprising. Manufacturing production in Britain and elsewhere has enjoyed an upturn in recent months, so we might have expected an improvement in cargo volumes passing through the port.

What the port really needs is the transformational impact of building the much talked about post-Panamax in-river terminal, at Seaforth.

This will allow Liverpool to handle the world’s biggest container vessels, which will soon be able to pass through the Panama Canal, after it is widened. At that point, those huge vessels will be looking for places to dock on the western fringes of Europe. If Liverpool isn’t capable of handling them, Zeebrugge, Rotterdam and Felixstowe will.

Any wildlife conservation issues must be weighed very carefully against the hugely beneficial economic impact to the area from allowing the terminal to proceed.

Between them, though, urban heritage groups and marine conservationists may yet scupper the group’s investment plans for the city altogether.