Contaminated land holding back project
£5million investment for Forthside remains unspent
Wrangling over contaminated land is delaying the handover of MOD land council officers have confirmed.
The site at Forthside may not be transferred to Stirling Council until the beginning of next year councillors heard on Thursday.
A £5million sum earmarked for work on the site meanwhile remains unspent.
A special meeting of the council’s finance, economy and corporate support committee was told that talks were still ongoing, with officers “confident” the deal could be done and the land transferred by December or January.
The council’s chief governance officer Julia Mcafee told councillors; “We are endeavouring to broker the clearance of the land of contaminated substances so we can get going - and that, as you can imagine, is not the most straightforward of procedures so that is the delay.”
Steven Mcdonald, interim head of economic development and culture, added: “These discussions with the MOD [Ministry of Defence] are ongoing and both sides are working hard to get to a resolution. Various assessments of the sites are happening as we speak, so we are working as quickly as we can to get a resolution to this.”
Earlier, chief finance officer Kirsty Stanners said she and a number of other senior management colleagues had last week met with officials from the UK government, Scottish Government, Clackmannanshire Council and Stirling University for an annual review of the City Region Deal, of which Forthside is a major element.
She said there was an “absolute dependency” on the MOD land being transferred to the council before the end of the financial year (March 2024) in order to meet ‘Levelling Up’ funding time limits.
However, she added: “My understanding is the window we expect it to be transferred is between December and January - so we have a little bit of contingency. There’s time built in there, but I’m hearing from the chief operating officer we are pretty confident this is going to happen.”
The officers had been pressed on the reasons for the £5million underspend and the complications of the contaminated land by SNP councillor Gerry Mclaughlan, who asked for the reasons for the repeated delays in signing the transfer agreement.
He added: “There’s no hidden agenda here. We know if the land was a normal brownfield site this would have taken months. The nature of the site is the problem and I think we should seek reassurance when that deal has been concluded that we are happy with the conclusion.”
Councillor Gerry Mclaughlan said later: “The development of Forthside offers tremendous potential to the growth of Stirling as a city. It could provide a fantastic opportunity for new jobs, homes and growth going forward.
“But I am seriously concerned about the quality of the land that the MOD is keen to transfer over to the council’s responsibility.
“There has been over 100 years of military use on the site, and caution is extremely important when taking on the development of a site where the contamination hazards remain unquantified.
“If the MOD and the UK government are serious about providing support to Stirling developing as a city through Forthside then they should offer to cover any liabilities uncovered in the site going forward, which are attributable to military operations.
“At present this deal has all the making of the council being landed with a pig in a poke, and Stirling Council having to pick up the tab.”