Homes planned site of old factory Fears of huge housing shortage as building fails to match demand
urban park-type setting.’
Access to the site will be provided off Edge Lane, through a locked gate, and pedestrians could enter through gates on the canal towpath.
The new development is being proposed by The Seamark Group, which owns the site, and is one of Europe’s ‘leading’ processors, exporters and distributors of frozen food.
The Edge Lane site is the company’s largest processing and cold store site.
The plan is to demolish the factory building and to relocate operations to their head office in Miles Platting in north Manchester. AN AREA of Greater Manchester could be facing a shortage of 3,000 homes in little more than two decades’ time.
The Office for National Statistics predicts that by 2041, there will be some 109,000 households living in Trafford – up from around 98,000 this year.
This increase will be driven both by natural factors – more births than deaths – and immigration from other parts of the UK and abroad.
At the same time, analysis of government data has shown that the current rate at which new homes are being built in Trafford is nowhere near fast enough to meet this growing demand.
There were 99,120 homes in the area in 2018 – up from 97,330 in 2012.
However, this was an average increase of just 298 new homes a year. Should the number of houses and flats continue to increase at this rate, by 2041 there will be 105,982 homes available in the area – some 3,018 short of the number needed.
These figures also assume that all the dwellings currently sitting empty in Trafford will be brought back into use.
At the moment, there are 2,428 vacant properties in the area – two per cent of the total housing stock.
Unless more vacant homes are occupied, it could mean the housing market will be even more squeezed in two decades’ time.
Every other area in Greater Manchester is likely to have more than enough housing in comparison, and the situation is also not quite so dire in most of the rest of the country.