Today Cherwell District Council published its draft plans for the next 20 years for Bicester. These have not yet been put to us for consultation - the Council is deciding at the end of the month when they will do that.
It seems that BaECON has been right all along about the Eco-town proposals being a half-baked and badly thought through idea. In their plans the Council has announced that their Eco-town will only be 40% completed by 2031 - almost 20 years away. At that rate of building the whole area would take another 34 years to complete, with ongoing development work from now until 2065.
The draft plan, which you can read here (all 220+ pages of it) makes it quite clear that over the next 20 years only 1,794 houses will be completed on the site. (Be warned the plan document is a big PDF file - over 20MB, so it might take you a while to download!)
Far from being a done deal, as we have been told by our councillors, it now appears that the Eco-town proposal will simply hang over Bicester for decades to come, blighting the town with complete uncertainty as to what is going to happen with the area.
The plans of course will only go ahead if our Cherwell Councillors continue with their plan to spend £9,200,000 of our money to get the scheme off the ground (that's a taxpayer contribution of £5,100 for every house to be built over the next 20 years). Cherwell say that they hope to recoup that money from later development, but given that their own figures expect this estate to take 40-50 years to complete there is an increasing likelihood that we will never see our money again from this wild gamble.
Let us hope that now the reality is dawning our District Councillors finally listen to reason and knock these plans on the head once and for all, before it's too late.
The 9.2 million is extra money; nobody in Bicester loses out. It would be good if more of that money was spent in existing Bicester, particularly now the eco-town is shrinking.
ReplyDeleteThe eco-towns PPS specifies a minimum of 5000 houses: is NW Bicester still an ecotown? If not, the money may have to go back.
I'm sure I read a while ago that Ian Inshaw's outfit had funding committed to the whole project. What happened to that?
As part of the deal to bring an Eco town to Bicester the government gave about £12m to be used on environmental projects across Bicester. Some of this was used for things like the Cooper School 6th form centre. The rest was supposed to be spent for the good of all of us, but now Cherwell Council is going to use it to pay for the Eco town things which the developers would normally pay for (e.g, the school, energy centre, community and business centres) because the developers don't actually have any money to do this.
DeleteWhen the scheme was first proposed by Barry Wood, P3Eco claimed to have a lot of sovereign wealth ready to invest in the site, but that appears to no longer be true and the developers are now pleading poverty.
The only way to now get the scheme going is to spend all the remaining Eco funding on the site and pray that in 7 or 8 years time a developer appears who is willing to pay the £9.2m back to us. In the meantime we have given up £9.2m that should be being spent on Bicester.
It's a world class shambles.
Delete