The application will be heard on Friday 30th June at Hove Town Hall and, if granted, will give the go-ahead for the controversial 40 storey tower together with a swing bridge across the harbour and another across black Rock beach, and seven new restaurants and bars.

Brighton & Hove Economic Partnership supported both the original application and the current application. (see stories in knowledgebase)

ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP COMMENT

This is the second time that an application that has received a recommendation for approval from council officers, has been put before the planning committee and the developers – Brunswick group – are confident that they have responded to the committee’s reservations over the original scheme.

The recently announced decision by Pfizer to shun the UK in favour of Germany because they consider the UK planning system to be too slow, too restrictive and too unpredictable demonstrates the importance of local planning decisions not just to the city but to the region and, ultimately to the entire country.

Pfizer’s European headquarters was going to be located in Surrey where it already has a presence but the pharmaceutical giant did not have enough confidence in the planning system to risk investing time and effort into a UK based scheme. Hundreds of millions of pounds will be lost to the UK economy as a result.

The Marina application is important because if it is rejected again, despite a second recommendation to approve by officers, it will send out the wrong signal to developers who are needed to deliver the new Brighton Centre and a host of other schemes that make up the £2bn of development that the city has planned over the next decade.