Skyscraper plans are Wirral's own space race

We must hope this is the beginning of a project of such towering ambition it will become our space race - climaxing in a generational 'giant leap' for the town of Birkenhead and our region.
The project's astonishing statistics speak for themselves. Costing £4.5bn it will see 500 acres of brownfield land transformed into a futurist Dubai like landscape.
Skyscrapers of up to and over 50 storeys will line the waterfront and the development will provide 1.4 million sq metres of floor space creating 27,000 jobs, 15,000 new homes, and over 750,000 sq m of retail and commercial development.
As a Birkenhead based business we see the desperate need to seize this glittering opportunity. Birkenhead has a bustling and improving business community helped enormously by the re-emergence of Cammell Laird shipyard, which we are proud to call a client of ours, and good work by Wirral Council to encourage networking within the business community.
But parts of Birkenhead remain among the poorest in Western Europe. The Daily Telegraph reported in November that Birkenhead has 75 per cent unemployment with 53 per cent of adults on incapacity benefit.
The reality of this enervating poverty is soul destroying social breakdown. Evidence is not hard to come by.
Just last week I watched a familiar scene in Hamilton Square as a drug addict high as a kite drifted into a sandwich shop. Aged around 40 pale with sunken cheeks he went behind the counter and asked incoherently for his cake to be cut into four pieces. It was an utterly pathetic spectacle to witness. We watched uneasily as the owner gently coaxed him round and cut his cake. I later saw him washing his face in the street. I
t was desperate and made all the more sad by how common behaviour like this is. He, and the others like him, are Birkenhead's lost generation, an underclass, that needs Wirral Waters to happen to demolish the vicious circle of abject poverty and lack of opportunity.
However there are signs that Wirral Waters is coming at the right time. The re-emergence of Cammell Laird has proven emphatically that the spirit of the town will not die. When Lairds closed its gates in 2001 it was a body blow to Birkenhead's self esteem. Lairds pumps the town's heart with pride and gives well paid skilled jobs to people of all backgrounds.
The firm's revival over the last seven years has seen it reclaim its rightful place as one of the leading shipyards in Britain and Europe. It has a full order-book, a workforce of 1500, including contractors, and last year in pumped more than £33m into the Merseyside economy. Importantly the Cammell Laird of 2009 retains the ethos of the Laird family - an ethos handed down through generations.
Simply put Birkenhead was built on vision of the Scottish raised Lairds. That vision was an incredibly powerful combination of industry and social benevolence.
Not only did the family build up one most of successful shipyards of the age they also gave back to the community. They built Hamilton Square, one of the finest Victorian Squares in Britain. And they were instrumental in building Birkenhead Park, a park so impressive Central Park in New York copied it.
The Lairds' ambition for social improvement was as all consuming as their entrepreneuralism. They thought big. And Wirral Waters is this century's equivalent to what Lairds was in the 1820s when the Scottish entrepreneur William Laird and his son John first saw the potential, precisely like Peel, of Wirral's underdeveloped dockland area. It is my passionate belief that Wirral Waters can capture the philanthropy of the Lairds, and with the modern day Cammell Laird, transform the polarised fortunes of the people of Wirral and Birkenhead. In the meantime as a business community we must do all in our power to help make this awe inspiring dream a reality.

May I take this opportunity to wish all of you a prosperous New Year.

Ben Pinnington is a director of Wirral based PR firm Artemis