Callaghan - John Street

Not a great amount about the actual development in that video, but still nice to see, with some nice aerial shots that will look very impressive if all gets built in the area. Mind you I'm intrigued to know what John Street phase 2 is going to be! and indeed where they're putting it

If all this goes ahead I wonder if we'll see some activity pretty quick given the timescale and size of development?

Yeah it's a bit wishy washy without much detail and they could have filmed when an Intercity was passing, the Valleys trains make us look very small town!!

Would be interesting too see where Phase 2 will be, there's the other side of the railway in Capital Quarter or Callghan Sq South maybe?

Well John Street is tiny and will be completely covered by this development, so if there is "John Street Phase 2" it won't be on John Street... I'm hoping they don't mean that they're building the structure in phases! The video actually looks like it might be hinting this. If that's the case we may never see the tower, but I'm pretty sure it would be built in one go. Maybe "Phase 2" is the redevelopment of the railway arches?

I wonder if they are thinking of developing the rest of Callaghan square?
Phase one is called called Callaghan John street, so I'm wondering if phase two will be another section of Callaghan square?

I wonder if they are thinking of developing the rest of Callaghan square?
Phase one is called called Callaghan John street, so I'm wondering if phase two will be another section of Callaghan square?

That makes sense actually. I'm quite intrigued now. The video states at the start that it's a proposal for a "Government Property Unit", so I guess we know for sure that it's for HMRC. Maybe this is Phase 1 of HMRC's move, and Phase 2 is Callaghan Square, potentially utilising the already approved building. Is it correct that HMRC actually need more space than this development offers? If so then this may be the case.

Thinking about it, wasn't there a further requirement of 180,000sqft presumably for MOJ?
That would make a nice phase 2 on Callaghan square.
And if I'm right I think they wanted that by 2020

305,000 square feet is probably enough for the 3,600 people HMRC want to host in the Cardiff Hub. The entire John St development - including the tower - is required for that square footage, so I can't see them developing it in phases unless they lose out with HMRC.

I think the additional 180,000 square foot requirement is more speculative, and dependent on yet-to-be-finalised plans for further moves of functions out of London and consolidation of functions in the region. It would be two decent-sized (although not that high) buildings in Callaghan Square.

Would be good to get some more private sector investment in the finance and professional services fields into the city. Over half the active named requirements are from the public sector which isn't a good position for the city to be in, once the existing "consolidation" is completed. We need more inward investment and expanding firms to fill up all the offices planned around Central Square and the remaining parts of Callaghan Square... before we even start thinking about Cardiff Waterside. [It was disappointing recently when Deloitte crammed their new hires into a few floors in Media Wales HQ (how much of that building do they actually still occupy?) at a rent of about £13 a square foot.. no more cheapskates please!]

I saw a video with a very senior figure from a major financial institution who was bemoaning all the excess regulations they now have to comply with. He mentioned that they had an office in Cardiff to deal with it. However it was fairly clear that he saw these as unnecessary jobs and ones he'd be very happy to discard. We have to welcome all private investment but I think we also need to think about what the quality of that investment is and be under no illusions.

I had no idea the HMRC workforce would be that huge. I had an interesting chat with my source there which again seemed quite indicative. The regional head office is in Bristol where you have a few hundred staff. There's vastly more staff in Cardiff but remarkably few senior ones. For those looking for career advancement Bristol dealing with corporate tax would seem the more exciting option.

Bristol does seem to be faring quite well of late. I wonder if they are benefiting from London simply becoming too expensive and the midlands and the north retaining a significant image problem? What can be done to boost our investment prospects? People will focus on education which is definitely a problem regionally but Cardiff is producing a lot of graduates as do other British cities. They then leave due to a lack of local opportunities. We have this huge gap between our Tier 1 city, London and our Tier 2 cities which have in many ways become Tier 3 cities in an increasingly globalised foreign-owned economy. Britain's elite seem desperate for London to compete with New York which is stupid for two reasons. Firstly I can't see why this should be a major priority and secondly it's obviously implausible for the capital of a $3tn economy to compete on a level playing field with a $17tn one. The only time that's happened since we lost the Empire was in the 1980s when we invited all the American financial companies to London with disastrous consequences in the long run. I'm sure it helped create a brain drain from the rest of the UK though and a complacency in Westminster about the overall state of UK plc.

The lack of ownership of our own economy, or indeed our ownership of businesses outside the UK ca't help the Tier 2 cities. Where are the new Cadbury's and Boots? The fact that no-one is too worried about the current account deficit, presumably financed by selling off the family silver to whoever wants it, means that it's unlikely to be a priority either. One thing that might have helped was renewable energy projects like tidal and wind power that some parts of provincial Britain would have been well placed to benefit from. Alas with the drop in energy prices that's on the backburner.

The only time that's happened since we lost the Empire was in the 1980s when we invited all the American financial companies to London with disastrous consequences in the long run.

If by this you mean "the financial crisis", I think you are mistaken. Many people seem to think it was the big investment bankers who got into trouble and dragged the UK down. It wasn't. It was actually largely down to a domestic credit bubble in the household and commercial sector, and associated dodgy and risky practises by lenders in the mortgage and commercial market. Too much reliance on wholesale funding, for instance. Too much credit-driven consumption and construction that fell off a cliff. And let's not forget that the fall in output in the manufacturing sector was much larger than in the services sector, as global trade tanked.

Surely manufacturing tanked because of a lack of demand not because there was anything fundamentally wrong with it? How many people were Lehman's and AIG employing in London? How much tax were they generating? Pushing up the value of sterling on the back of an industry that was about to collapse. Stuff that then couldn't be replaced. The bigger impact was surely that we encouraged a race to the bottom on regulation and the Americans felt they had no choice but to react or lose business. Bill Clinton axed Glass Steagall. I agree that there was an explosion in credit and housing bubble but we were saved from the consequences of that by not building enough houses and propping up prices! I take the point about retail banks being over-leveraged but again what were we doing with a banking sector the size of the United States'? Admittedly since some of the worst offenders were HBOS and RBS so it wasn't merely a London thing. But a huge credit economy must have been of benefit to the financial capital and lead to a brain drain from places like Wales?