Huncoat Garden Village’s six week delay

The huge housebuilding scheme Huncoat Garden Village is already six weeks behind schedule before a single brick has been laid, but council chiefs have said everything is going according to plan.

Securing a £463 million development project to deliver over 1800 brownfield homes and a new relief road is no simple task, with planners having to negotiate with multiple landowners and restore land contaminated by the old power station before a single home can be built.

Homes England has awarded Hyndburn Council almost £30 million to get the project off the ground and fund the key infrastructure investments required so that developers can start construction, including purchasing land for a 1.1km relief road to connect Huncoat to the A56.

But despite this six week lag, Huncoat Garden Village is still on track to begin delivering homes by as soon as 2028, Hyndburn Council’s head of regeneration and housing Mark Hoyle told a Special Scrutiny Committee on Tuesday.

In part, this is because the scheme’s designers had already included up to five months of delays into their plans, knowing that legal challenges and compulsory purchase orders of land could cause ‘slippage’.

The council’s housing chief wrote in his report: “The project is progressing broadly as planned, with good progress made on the proposed relief road, landowner negotiations, and remediation agreements.”

He also indicated that, after receiving the go-ahead to make compulsory purchase orders for land in April and planning permission in July for the relief road, formal cash offers have been made to landowners, who are now deep in negotiation over the price.

This was cited as one of the reasons the compulsory purchase orders had received 60 objections, though only five were from the affected landowners.

Mr Hoyle told the committee: “Those objections, certainly three of the five, are potentially objections in terms of negotiating position so the landowners get maximum value for their land. We’d expect that, it’s not unusual.”

Work to build this road is due to start in May 2027, though the report admitted that further delays from these compulsory purchase negotiations could cause further slippage.

However, Mr Hoyle’s report to the scrutiny committee elaborated on another major issue that will need to be resolved before all 1800 homes can be created.

“Currently, there is a finite supply of electricity for new housing at Huncoat, with the existing network capacity to be sufficient for approximately 350 homes,” the document explains.

This is enough electricity supply to power the first part of the housebuilding project on the site of the former power station, where McDermott Homes have submitted an application to build 360 homes.

Additional supply will need to be found to power the other 1400 homes that are due to be delivered on the brownfield site over the next 15 years, with Hyndburn Council employing an outside firm to find a solution to the issue – which could include building a new electricity sub-station.

Concerns were raised at the special scrutiny committee by councillors Zak Khan (Conservative) and Anthony Mitchell (Reform UK) about the delivery of essential utilities to this large project, with members asking if the plans took ‘futureproofing’ into consideration.

Mr Hoyle pointed out that developers would have to pay for these measures and responded: “Recent changes in regulation and legislation mean there are more independent operators in the market.

“The study’s timetable has been extended to bring in these independents, who have got more modern methods of bringing electricity to the site.”

Cllr Khan then asked: “So you’re saying that you’re confident that Huncoat Garden Village will have no problems with utilities or water?”

The council’s housing chief responded: “We know that, for the first phase of housing, there is sufficient electricity capacity. So we don’t have to worry about the first five years of supply, it’s beyond that.”