Decision details

Councillor Eamonn O’Brien, the Leader of the Council and Cabinet Member for Finance and Growth, presented the report which outlined proposals to dispose of Council owned land at School Street and Green Street. This would allow the construction of 225 new homes (of which 125 will be of affordable tenures) and would generate a significant capital receipt along with unlocking in excess of £30million of private investment and driving economic growth. It was noted that this report had been received and endorsed by the Radcliffe Cabinet Committee, and that full details of the proposal commercial terms were set out in the Part B report later in the agenda. 

Decision:

Cabinet:

1.   Approved the disposal of land at School Street and Green Street in Radcliffe for housing development;

2.   Approved the commercial terms of these disposals as set out in the report; and

3.   Delegated authority to approve the finalised terms of the agreement to the Director of Economic Regeneration and Capital Growth in consultation with the Cabinet Member for Finance, S151 Officer and Monitoring Officer.

Reasons for the decision:

·         Enable the delivery of key sites as part of the Councils Strategic Regeneration Framework for Radcliffe.

·         Facilitate the Councils Brownfield first approach to housing delivery.

·         Delivery of much needed homes with a range of affordable tenures and typologies to reflect the modern demands of housing in Radcliffe.

·         Generate capital receipt upon the successful disposal of the sites.

·         Reduce revenue cost to the council of holding, maintaining and securing this long term cleared sites.

Other options considered and rejected:

·         An alternative traditional approach would be to appoint an agent, formulate development brief through planning analysis, collate marketing materials, openly market the site and attract commercial offers from the market. This would incur sales and marketing costs along with delaying the construction of homes by approximately.18 months. This would then risk oversaturation of the Radcliffe property market when other sites come online at the same time.

·         In line with the CBRE advice, the quality of the proposals is considerable, the affordable housing is in excess of the planning policy compliant threshold and accelerates the construction of the homes. In addition the commercial offer is considerably higher than the Councils book value.

·         The Council is also disposing of 40 other sites through the Accelerated Land Disposal Programme (ALDP). Capacity is limited and there is an acute housing need across the district. These disposals are oven ready, allowing resources to be spent unlocking other brownfield housing sites.

·         For these reasons this was discounted.