£172m deal to speed up new infrastructure for Aylesbury
Buckinghamshire Council are looking at the plans today (Tues).
A £172 million deal is set to be signed, to push forward major housing plans as part of the Aylesbury Garden Town scheme.
Buckinghamshire Council’s top team is being asked to give powers to its planning and finance chiefs to approve a contract for the project’s Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF).
Worth an eye-watering £172 million, the deal will see the council partner up with Homes England to enable the building of 10,000 homes, roads and schools stretching to 2035.
These homes will be some of the 16,000 set to be built in Aylesbury over the next 13 years as part of the Garden Town project.
A council report read:
“The contract is a long-term commitment for both parties and ensures that the authority is seen as both a facilitator and deliverer of new infrastructure and homes in Aylesbury.”
A timetable included in the contract would see an infrastructure programme delivered by 2024 to enable the building of 1,046 homes by March of that year.
The remaining 8,768 homes would be up by the end of March 2035, with all things going to plan.
However, the project expenditure is only until March 2024 and “some projects will need to demonstrate good progress to ensure that this deadline is met, that funding is not lost, and housing delivery is enabled.”
A new governance board is also set to be created to add an extra layer of oversight for the ambitious building programme.
This has been proposed as “there is currently no member forum beneath Cabinet where decisions could be made across the HIF programme.”
If created, the board will be an additional advisory body.
The contract signing has been accelerated, however, meaning the final wording of the deal has not yet been completed.
For this reason, Buckinghamshire Council’s cabinet will not officially agree on the signing of the contract when it meets next week (October 13).
Instead, the authority’s top team is set to agree to hand responsibility of the signing of the deal to the council’s planning boss and its finance chief.