Invest Northern Ireland has signalled its intent to make the £10 million Mandeville Industrial Estate in Craigavon a development priority.
Invest NI representative, Sharon Keenan explained at a recent ABC committee meeting that although Mandeville Industrial Estate remains largely vacant, developing it will require extensive liaising with other stakeholders.
Speaking at a recent Economic Development & Regeneration committee meeting of the local authority, the senior Invest NI representative revealed that 95 acres at Mandeville, out of 99, remain unused, at a time when there is a severe shortage of available industrial land across the borough.
She stated: “At the moment we have approximately 470 acres available for business across Northern Ireland.
“We are in a tight environment for budget. We will explore alternative options for funding, and we will work closely with the Department for the Economy to ensure – in particular for Mandeville – that we are allocated a budget to develop it.
“Planning brings certainty, so without zonings for new industrial lands, it’s very difficult to bring forward new business parks, so we will continue to work closely with your colleagues on the planning process.
“Sometimes planning can be slow, and we would like to see economic development planning applications prioritised, so that they don’t just fall into the tray and are treated just as they come.
“Infrastructure is a significant risk, and I don’t think it will come as a surprise to any of you that wastewater in particular is a problem. We work very closely with the utility providers, as we recognise the importance of adequate utilities to economic growth.”
Ms Keenan, who is a property manager at Invest NI, in charge of Acquisitions and Development, explained the statutory body was planning to invest significant funding in the ABC Borough: “We’ve had quite a bit of business activity, and quite a bit of business growth in your area in the last 10 years.
“We have invested £0.5m in industrial infrastructure, and that was really to open up land and put in utilities, or work with the utility providers for connections and so on.
“We’ve sold 22 sites totalling 56 acres, we’ve facilitated the growth plans of 15 companies. We’re currently working with five companies on growth plans that will see a further 16 acres sold for development in the council area.
“We are in the process of awarding a contract to open up additional land in Halfpenny Valley, so we’ll be investing in the region of £400,000 in Halfpenny Valley.
“Our focus will be on the development of the Mandeville lands. That’s currently estimated at approximately £10m. We also have land in the north west, so our plans are to invest in both sites to open them up for further business growth.
“We are committed to working in partnership with stakeholders at a local level to understand specific land and property needs, and together co-design and deliver solutions.
“We’re keen to understand what the barriers to business growth are, and together with our local partners co-design and deliver targeted interventions.
“Strategically-located sites offer businesses the opportunities to maximise economic opportunities arising from our unique access to the dual markets, and also to the all-island economy.
“Local development plans and responsibility for delivery sit with yourselves, but we feed into that process and we will continue to work with your council officials.”
The Invest NI official continued: “Across Northern Ireland we have 49 business parks, of which we have land available in 30. In the past 12 years or so we have sold quite a bit of land, so our land holding is starting to diminish.
“We’ve sold that to businesses and they’ve grown into those sites and expanded, some have moved on, etc. We own just shy of 2,700 acres in total. The vast majority – 2,200 acres – is occupied.
“The ambition of the Regional Property Programme is to deliver between 300 and 400 acres of new industrial land across Northern Ireland, to provide at least one strategic business park, and to embed a more flexible and proactive regional presence to develop partnership property solutions tailored to specific regional economic needs.”
Regional manager, Ethna McNamee explained that Mandeville Industrial Estate was viewed as a clear priority by Invest NI: “Mandeville is going to be a strategic priority for Invest NI over the next coming years, to deliver that site and make it available for economic development for your businesses.
“We’re hearing that local enterprise agencies are at capacity, and that the stumbling block is the move-on space, that the businesses [have] nowhere for them to grow into, and potentially Mandeville could offer an option for us, to work with local stakeholders to see if we can unlock that stumbling block, and help those businesses to grow and move on.
“And subject to budget availability, potentially in the future, [we could] identify and deliver additional property solutions to facilitate growth in the borough.”
Invest NI chief executive, Kieran Donoghue stressed the need for more industrial land: “Our clients in the borough and right across the region want to reinvest, and as part of our strategy we’re committed to enabling them to reinvest.
“We absolutely recognise the need for us to acquire and develop more land, to enable our clients to undertake that investment.
“We will for the foreseeable future, I suspect, be working with our parent department and making representations in Stormont to secure the necessary budget, to enable us to acquire and develop the necessary lands.
“Our discussions with NI Networks and NI Water have been very constructive, very frank, very open, very engaging.
“They’ve been able to say to us, ‘Here are locations across the region where there’s spare capacity’, and they’ve been able to look at our sites and tell us where there needs to be incremental investment, or where there is surplus capacity, so that helps us to plan in terms of our marketing and promotion strategy.
“If a manufacturing client from overseas comes to us and they need a lot of water and wastewater very quickly, we know which sites have the spare capacity, and we know which ones need some additional development, depending on the needs of the clients, so we have found those discussions very helpful.”
