A council will pay £1.1 million to advance its own planning application for 71 new family homes.
An extra £22m is expected to be forked out by the local authority for the land purchase of the development site if the proposal proceeds to the next stage.
Bexley Council’s interim director of finance and corporate services, Caroline Holland, approved the payment of £1.107m to BexleyCo Homes to fund the scheme up to the stage of submitting a planning application.
BexleyCo is the council’s own property developer, which currently has the ambitious target of investing in and delivering 1,200 homes in the borough over the next decade.
The payment will be used to prepare a planning application to build 71 homes at Burr Farm in Bexleyheath. The houses would be built on green space to the rear of properties in Belvedere Road and Church Road.
BexleyCo has said that 50% of the homes will be two-bedroom properties, 40 per cent will be three-bedroom and 10 per cent will be four-bedroom. Each house will also feature its own car parking and private garden.
A planning notice read: “The proposal aims to sensitively respond to the site’s setting, by respecting and preserving the privacy of neighbouring properties with the ‘garden to garden’ approach to the layout.”
The £1.1 million payment will be provided in the form of equity and the costs will be incurred at risk to Bexley Council if the scheme does not progress to the planning application stage.
According to council documents, the money will cover “planning, additional design and development costs” such as “surveys and investigations that will be required to progress the development to planning”.
If the Burr Farm scheme does progress to this stage, the council is obligated to give a further estimated payment of £22.075m (excluding VAT) to BexleyCo to complete the land purchase for the Burr Farm site.
