Loampit Vale rescued by £20.5m of Goverment’s cash

The Mercury reports an incredible turn of events for Lewisham Town Centre, the Housing Minister John Healey has in fact announced that the Government will give £20.5m to Barratt Homes to allow the development at Loampit Vale to proceed.

The Housing Minister justified the cash to Barratts with the motivation that:

We have used the power of public investment to ensure that even in the downturn we continue to build the homes the country needs.
But I want to make the best of every taxpayer’s pound, which is why I am requiring those benefiting from this extra cash to offer local job and apprenticeship opportunities.

I really thought that there already were incentives for local jobs and apprenticeships. £20.5m sounds a bit dear for just one development.

Could it be that the Housing Minister is helping the Labour administration of Lewisham to save the face before an election with quite a bit of our money?

The negotiation for this development was a masterpiece in incompetence, this deal was signed off during recession but using a financial model developed during the housing bubble.
Even a donkey would have known that it couldn’t work.
Not Mayor Bullock though, he signed off the transfer of the most valuable plot of public land in the Borough to a developer on the back of an unrealistic deal, and if after this mess the Government would not have intervened with an unprecedented £20.5m handout to the land developer we would have remained with that hole in the ground in front of Lewisham Station for years to come.

By the way, when Loampit Vale was approved I made the prediction that Barratt would have come back with new requests in order to proceed, on that count I was right. I thought that they would have asked for more storeys to be added or a reduction in social housing. I’d have never thought that it would have been an all out handout of tens of millions in cash.

Tags: budgets, Loampit Vale