Delay in £7.4m work on historic city buildings

IT has still not been revealed which of Bradford’s ageing heritage buildings will receive an injection of over £7m of regeneration money.

West Yorkshire Combined Authority last year agreed to provide £7.4m of funding to help the transformation of three buildings in the city centre.

The money would help kickstart work to turn the buildings into housing and business spaces. As well as the Combined Authority funding, the projects would involve a large amount of private investment, in total taking the budget for all three buildings to £31m.

However, when the funding was announced the authority was tight-lipped on which buildings would receive the big injection of public cash. And despite work on the first building due to have started in December, the identity of the buildings is still to be revealed. Bradford Council said the information is still “commercially confidential”.

The Combined Authority first announced the funding last summer, saying that without it developers would be put off by the high costs of bringing the old buildings back to life, and they would probably remain empty.

The authority described the unnamed buildings as being “of major significance to Bradford’s industrial and commercial heritage”.

A Bradford Council spokesperson said: “We are still in the process of securing a final approval for the potential grant funding for this programme, so information on individual properties that might be assisted is still commercially confidential at this stage.”