Lancashire renewal on hold after 2m funding cut by NWDA

A Lancashire council is searching for last-minute funding for a housing regeneration scheme after money promised by the North-West Development Agency was delayed.

The regional development agency gave Hyndburn Borough Council an “in principle” allocation of £2m of single regeneration budget money for 2004/5 and 2005/6 for a scheme to boost housing in Accrington.

However, the authority has now been informed by the NWDA that it will not meet its commitment to provide £822,000 in 2004/5 to fund relocation packages for owner-occupiers.

Its decision comes after claims in April that the NWDA had “over-committed” its funding allocations by £200m (HT 12 March, page 7).

The regeneration project involves knocking down 188 homes in an area of low demand and building about 80, of which 29 would be social housing provided by Space New Living.

Hyndburn planned to pay for the scheme, called Project Phoenix, with the £2m of SRB cash and £2.6m from the housing market renewal programme.

Mark Hoyle, strategic housing manager at Hyndburn council, said: “This shortfall has made delivery of this programme more challenging.

“Although the NWDA is saying it will eventually provide the funds we were allocated, we can’t wait that long.

“In the majority of cases, people living in the Project Phoenix area want to relocate very quickly, so we would prefer not to wait for the NWDA. We are therefore looking at alternative sources of funding.”

The RDA says it fully intends to meet its commitment to the authority by the end of April 2007 at the latest and is in the process of appraising Hyndburn’s plans.

Ian Whittaker, the NWDA’s area manager for Lancashire, denied that the agency had over-committed itself.

He said: “As a new agency, we had a big budget with not a lot of projects to spend it on, which meant we actually had to go out to partners and say, ‘we’ve got this money available, we need to work up projects’.

“We’ve now got to the stage where we’ve built up a programme of projects so we now have to say to partners, ‘yes, we’ll build these projects up, but we can’t fund everything at once, exactly when you need it’.”