Stuart Powell

Angela Rayner has had two dossiers on her desk for months, asking her to investigate Manchester City Council. Her response:- silence. £868m of public loans to one developer. £55.7m to Man City's owners' companies. Our emails blocked from councillors. The dossiers also set out:- • Viability files on four Renaker schemes "lost" • Over a third of Manchester Council's FEC deal kept hidden Her department last replied in June. DM me if you'd like a copy of the dossiers and a short summary. #ProjectCleanCity @SianReform @NathanEvansTeam @JoshHalliday @rbrooks45 @DeclanGCarey @jackdulhanty

So how did a property adviser end up posting about Andy Burnham and Abu Dhabi? All we wanted was a planning permission. It took Manchester City Council over nine years to give us one. In that time Renaker put up about a dozen towers, seven of them around our site. My client has owned a site on Great Jackson Street in Manchester for 40 years. In October 2017 we started work on planning for 1,037 flats there. We are Manchester born and bred. Friends in London warned us that development in Manchester was "the Wild West". We didn't know how right they were. We were told we had to provide £28.8m of affordable housing. So we asked what Renaker's Deansgate Square next door had paid. The answer:- Nothing. Zero. Nada. Zip. 1,508 flats and no section 106 agreement at all. Nobody at Manchester City Council could explain why. On four Renaker schemes MCC has "lost" the viability files. We were told we had to pay just over £1m as an upfront payment. Exactly £1,000 per flat. Across 20 Renaker towers and 8,543 homes, Manchester City Council took just £487,000. That is £57 a home. So we kept looking. We found £598m of public loans from Andy Burnham's GMCA to Renaker. Add in the other public sources and it is £868m, to companies controlled by one man. None of these loans were ever publicised and the loan terms remain almost entirely hidden. It took nearly four years just to get to the planning committee. Over nine years on, nothing is built. We then asked MCC for permission to knock down our own empty warehouses. It refused, giving ten flimsy reasons. So off to court we went. In January 2026 a High Court judge rejected all ten and held that MCC had "acted unreasonably". That case cost MCC over £200,000 of public money. And for what? My client also owns the main Royal Mail depot on Oldham Road. MCC has since told us that land sits inside its joint venture with Far East Consortium. It has kept over a third of that agreement hidden, including the plan, and won't show it to us. Why? So we carried on asking questions. Then they blocked my emails. We never set out to investigate anyone. We asked one question, got no answer, and kept digging. We still are. #ProjectCleanCity @SianReform @NathanEvansTeam @JoshHalliday @rbrooks45 @DeclanGCarey @jackdulhanty