Boris faces £50M homes ultimatum
M27 ‘garden village’ scheme under threat unless cash is delivered
A 6,000-HOME development is under threat unless the government provides £50 million in funding for a vital motorway expansion project, council leaders have told the prime minister Boris Johnson.
The 20-year Welborne project near Fareham hinges on access to and from the M27.
A letter to the PM from local and county authorities and the developer states: ‘The delivery of Welborne Garden Village is under threat unless Government funding can be found as a matter of urgency.’
A PLEA has gone to Prime Minister Boris Johnson to save a threatened 6,000-home development with a £50m payout.
The Welborne Garden Village – a development north of Fareham that will take more than 20 years to be finished – received outline planning permission from the borough council a year ago.
But nothing can be built until funding is secured to expand the nearby junction 10 of the M27, estimated to cost more than £75m.
Now, council leaders have written to the PM to plead for a huge sum of money. The project is about to lose £24m that had been pledged as it needs to be spent by March next year – and won’t be.
More than £30m had been granted from the Department of Transport and the Solent LEP, with only £5.9m being spent before the deadline.
And this has added to the £20m shortfall that was needed to get the motorway improvement off the ground. Junction 10 needs to be converted to an ‘all-ways’ junction, as currently drivers can only get on to the eastbound carriageway and off the westbound side there.
Fareham Borough Council leader Sean Woodward and Hampshire County Council leader Keith Manns, alongside Mark Thistlethwayte, chairman of Welborne development company Buckland, have written to Boris Johnson to warn that the entire development is ‘under threat’.
The letter states: ‘The delivery of Welborne Garden Village is under threat unless government funding can be found as a matter of urgency.
‘Without urgent funding support from the government the whole development could be stalled for a considerable while.’
The government was not in a position to turn down the request without essentially scrapping the entire project, according Cllr Woordward.
He said: ‘The unfortunate thing is that I had to literally wait for Department for Transport funding to time out - there was no way on earth that money was going to be spent.
‘This is an issue we often have with grant funding that put timescales on when it can be spent.
‘With a project the size of Welborne you really can't do that. The craziness of the situation is that I had to wait for the clock to tick until we got a point where the LEP said ‘you're definitely not going to spend it by then’.
The lobbying of central government has also seen Fareham MP Suella Braverman write to the Department of Transport and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in attempt to secure more money.
The soaring cost of the infrastructure project – estimated at £30m in 2017 – and the current economic turmoil had to ‘call into question the viability of the development’, according to Fareham Borough Councillor Shaun Cunningham, who has repeatedly questioned the plans for the garden village.
He said: ‘It is coming on for five years since the public inquiry on Welborne, and in that community groups said the time scale was absolutely unrealistic.
‘They were proven right. ‘It’s always been on the fringe of viability, and the cost of the junction 10 works has increased threefold – what about the other costs?
‘It has to call into question the viability of the development.’
It’s nearly five years on from a public inquiry into the 6,000-home Welborne development and a year since it received outline planning permission from Fareham Borough Council. But not a brick has been laid. Why? Because building can’t begin until funding is secured to expand the nearby junction 10 of the M27 at a cost of £75m.
This is vital to the whole scheme as at the moment drivers can only get on to the eastbound carriageway and off the westbound side.
Time — or the lack of it — has become a huge issue as the project is about to lose £24m if it's not spent by March next year. More than £30m was granted on that condition from the Department of Transport and the
Solent LEP and only £5.9m has been used up so far.
This has added to the £20m shortfall that was needed to get the motorway improvement off the ground.
So today we report how Fareham leader Sean Woodward, Hampshire County Council leader Keith Manns and the chairman of development company Buckland, Mark Thistlethwayte, have written to prime minister Boris Johnson and urged him to authorise a £50m payout to keep the Welborne vision alive.
They’ve got a pretty highpowered ally in Fareham MP and Attorney General Suella Braverman, who has lent her weight by writing to the Department of Transport and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to try to secure the cash.
Ultimately, if it needs the PM’s sign-off then we hope his aides recognise its importance and it appears in his in-tray very soon.
Of course, he has plenty of other issues to contend with at the moment. But Welborne is a major project that will go a long way to helping meet government housing targets and address the shortage of homes in the south.
The harsh reality is that, without the £50m, it may never get off the drawing board.