TAMESIDE Council admits it has to convince bodies to try and keep more than £9 million of funding for Godley Green Garden Village.
The authority received £10 million from Homes England as it looks to build the controversial development, which will see 2,150 homes erected.
But it has conceded a ‘delivery’ deadline of March 31, 2024 is ‘extremely unlikely to be met.’
As a result, it is in talks with Homes England and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority over securing an extension.
In a report to the meeting of Tameside Council’s strategic planning and capital monitoring panel on Thursday, June 22, it states: “The budget for Godley Green includes £10m of Homes England Grant funding.
“£720,000 of this grant has been spent to date, the remaining sum is subject to challenging milestones, which require delivery by March 31, 2024.
“It is extremely unlikely that these delivery milestones will be met and discussions are in progress with Homes England and GMCA regarding future funding.
“A formal request has been made to Homes England to extend the expenditure deadline in relation to the Housing Infrastructure Fund works (£9.280m) and associated milestones due to delays obtaining planning consent.
“The funding has therefore been provisionally reprofiled. This will be confirmed once formal approval has been received from Homes England.
“Once the planning process is complete, it is expected that the business case, including the financial modelling, will be refreshed and options for delivery of the scheme subject to Executive Cabinet decision.”
The Housing Infrastructure Fund is a government capital grant programme of up to £2.3 billion, which will help to deliver up to 100,000 new homes in England.
Plans for Godley Green Garden Village, which would see the homes built close to Mottram Old Road, have already received thousands of objections and opponents have dubbed it a ‘green belt grab.’
And a formal objection by Claire Elliott, of the save Tameside Green Belt group, compared granting permission to being like allowing a ship to head to the rocks.
It even compared approving the scheme to the 1967 Torrey Cannon disaster, which saw the biggest ship ever to be wrecked when it hit a reef and a cargo of 119,000 tons of crude oil spew out into the sea at Cornwall.
A Board of Investigation concluded that Captain Pastrengo Rugiati was responsible by his decision to come east of the Scilly Isles, and then to pass between reef and islands, disregarding instructions to mariners from the British Admiralty.
It states: “Just as Captain Rugiati was too slow to adjust, he had a plan and saw far too late that the plan was doomed to failure — and with it his ship.
“So also, the Godley Green Garden Village proposal is badly off course and on its current trajectory doomed to failure.
“The question is whether the planning authority has the independence statute demands and the integrity of purpose to refuse an application which is clearly defective.
“Furthermore, whether the council’s chief executive is willing to instruct a change of direction or risk ‘plan continuation bias’ and potentially become Tameside’s very own Captain Pastrengo Rugiati.”
Once again TMBC have proved they are incapable of being able to organise anything.
Plowing on regardless despite 4000 objections from the people that actually live in Tameside. Lets hope they are shown for the incompetence they have shown so far in regards of planning , listening to the public and treating land owners of Godley Green appallingly in the process! Once its gone its gone forever!
I have to confess I do not live in Hyde but not far away and am dismayed at these proposals to build on this land. Too much of our greenspace and native plants etc are being destroyed.