The deal will create a company known as an Urban Regeneration Vehicle (URV), into which Croydon Council will invest land and John Laing equity. 

Through this limited liability partnership, the council will receive a 50/50 share in profits and will maintain ongoing control of its extensive regeneration agenda by retaining an interest as a partner-landowner as well as through utilising its planning powers.

"Today, more than ever, the public sector is looking for innovation from commercial partners to help maximise returns from their assets," said John Laing Projects & Developments managing director Jamie Kerr.

"Croydon Council is leading the way and we are delighted to be working with them in developing this unique model that will deliver new infrastructure and significant regeneration to the local communities it serves."

The 25 year URV partnership will provide the phased regeneration of four important town centre sites with the creation of two 40 storey towers with approximately 650 residential units; a combination of both private and affordable accommodation.  In total the four sites will create approximately 1,250 new residential units, to be delivered between 2012 and 2017.

The project also includes the delivery of a brand new 2.2HA headquarters office building for the council.  It is anticipated that the council’s land value and share of development profit will be sufficient to pay for the building and its running costs for many years.

With the council’s long-term regeneration strategy, it also has the option to add additional sites into the partnership as and when further development is required over the next 25 years.

The project has been supported by advisors working in partnership with the URV.  King Sturge (commercial) and Eversheds (legal) acted as advisors to Croydon Council, while  Denton Wilde Sapte (legal), Grant Thornton (financial/tax), EPR Architects (architects) and Knight Frank (property), Faber Maunsell AECOM (ME & Structure), Indigo (planning) and AYH (cost consultants) worked alongside John Laing.

"This is a complex deal achieved in difficult market conditions and the first of its kind completed by a local authority," said King Sturge Financial Services managing director Chris Pratt.

"It will hopefully provide the blueprint for the many council's that are facing similar challenges."

UK regional manager Rod Stewart puts the strong results down to a strong international presence
"There's more to the middle east than Dubai and there's lots of activity in the Gulf overall," said Rod Stewart. "Dubai is more susceptible [to the current financial crisis] but they're not turning the tap off overnight."

Hyder are looking towards energy and in particular nuclear as growth areas for the year ahead.
 "There has been a strong growth in public transport, renewable energy and nuclear including decommissioning," said Stewart. "We're growing in nuclear. We've just signed an alliance with Bradtec who will be working with us in an exclusive way. They are close to the technology end of decommissioning. They are specialists who understand how to speed the process of making sites safe. We have a new CEO (chief executive officer) Ivor Catto who has a strong background in nuclear and joins us this week."

The agreement with nuclear decommissioning technology specialist Bradtec extends an existing partnership which will be working on a waste-reduction framework for Magnox South, the operator of five nuclear sites currently being decommissioned and a four-year commission from the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency (NDA) on its Direct Research Portfolio (DRP) for waste processing.

The comments were published alongside the ORR's national rail review paper, highlighting the large quantity of work that needs to be completed over Christmas and New Year.

ORR chief executive Bill Emery said: "Engineering work on the railways is vital in order to maintain the network and to bring about the improvements to capacity, performance and safety that rail travellers expect.

"But Network Rail knows it is required to reduce the amount of disruption caused by its engineering projects, and avoid the sort of overruns we saw last year.

"Passengers and freight users alike will shortly be able to see the improvements brought about by the long-running work on the west coast main line.

"By finishing this work to the latest agreed plan, Network Rail will show that it has responded positively to the challenges posed by this programme. It can further help re-establish public confidence in its work by completing its Christmas engineering plans on time," he said.

Despite this warning, the latest set of figures from ORR's national rail review shows record performance on the network.

For 22 June to 13 September 2008, the public performance measure (PPM) for performance and delay minutes was at 90.5%, slightly above the target of 90.1%. Delay minutes are 9.8% down on the same period last year, at 3.84M delay minutes.

The regulator said infrastructure reliability is still improving, with the performance of track assets showing the most notable improvement. Assets are failing less frequently, and the overall level of delays caused by infrastructure continues to fall. Safety remains at an all-time low, and Network Rail is outperforming its budget.