It is difficult to imagine that a proposal to turn Birmingham’s former Queen Elizabeth Hospital into a £100 million world class medical research centre could generate any serious opposition in a city that needs desperately to position itself to take advantage of job opportunities created by science-based development.

The scheme being put forward by University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust certainly ticks all of the right boxes and is at last a tangible sign of what it means in practice to be a Science City.

Birmingham, with its three highly respected universities, already has a well deserved reputation for cutting-edge medical research. By establishing a critical mass of clinical trials and research and development at the Queen Elizabeth site, the goal of becoming the Harvard of the UK no longer appears to be beyond reach.

And yet, one of the potentially most exciting development proposals for decades has not been greeted with universal support.

In order to make its proposals stack up financially, UHB must maximise the value of the former Selly Oak Hospital. That means selling the site for housing, with some 900 homes envisaged on the land.

Even though Birmingham City Council has in the past backed grand plans to develop a sustainable urban village in Selly Oak, some local councillors are complaining that the hospital housing scheme is over the top.

One councillor and former Tory parliamentary candidate, Nigel Dawkins, has gone so far as to describe the housing proposal as “crazy” and is urging the city planning committee to reject the scheme.