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Ian Simpson, the architect whose glassy monoliths have become synonymous with 21st-century Manchester,  has won the race to refurbish the town hall extension.

His company were awarded the contract this week – with London-based Ryder Architecture getting a second, to re-fit the Central Library.

The entire project is expected to take four years and cost in the region of £165m.

Council chiefs have promised the new designs will be ’sympathethic’. Something like this, perhaps?

£7.4million. That’s the amount councils in Greater Manchester have paid out in trip-and-slip claims in the last financial year.
In truth, it’s a reduction on previous years – particularly for councils like Manchester, which have instituted a ‘zero-tolerance’ policy on bogus claims. They now fight virtually every disputed case through the courts.
That brings its own problems, though. Court action, and evidence-gathering, don’t come cheap.
Stockport council has already paid out £160,000 fighting a claim dating back to 2004. Trafford spent £130,000 disputing a woman’s demand for compensation after she tripped on a pavement. She was eventually awarded nearly £57,000.
Salford topped the list of compensation pay-outs last year, at £1.78m. That’s the equivalent of nearly two per cent
on every council tax bill in the city.
I’m not against the principle of fair compensation where blame can be attributed. But the sums awarded are bound to raise eyebrows – particularly when they are coming from the public purse.
A couple of years ago I asked, under the Freedom of Information Act, for Manchester council’s database of trip-and-slip claims. I got it – with the names removed, of course.
I discovered that one resident who fractured an ankle in a fall in Benchill in 2002 settled for £30,000.
At the time I pointed out:

That is nearly three times as much as the standard government compensation payment of £11,000 to the husband or wife of someone killed as the result of a violent crime.

You could add that it is as much as ten times more than traumatised soldiers have been given on their return from Iraq or Afghanistan.
Part of the problem is that the law doesn’t seem to adjust for degrees of blame. For example: if I trip over a pothole, then this may be partly the council’s fault, since they are responsible for keeping the highways in good condition. But it is also partly my fault, since – quite simply – I didn’t look where I was going. Surely I shouldn’t be compensated for that part of my injury caused by inattention or blind stupidity?
It’s impossible to form a judgement about individual settlements without knowing all the facts. But as long as there are people being paid the equivalent of a year’s salary for falling over and breaking a bone, there are going to be an awful lot of people trying to play the system.

And they say local government isn’t a hotbed of comedy…
Here’s a motion going before Manchester city council next week: