Welborne development 'under threat' unless government finds £50 million, Boris Johnson told

The Welborne Garden Village – a development north of Fareham that will take more than 20 years to be finished – received outline planning permission from the borough council a year ago.

But nothing can be built until funding is secured to expand the nearby junction 10 of the M27, estimated to cost more than £75m.

Now, council leaders have written to the PM to plead for a huge sum of money. The project is about to lose £24m that had been pledged as it needs to be spent by March next year – and won’t be. More than £30m had been granted from the Department of Transport and the Solent LEP, with only £5.9m being spent before the deadline.

And this has added to the £20m shortfall that was needed to get the motorway improvement off the ground. Junction 10 needs to be converted to an ‘all-ways’ junction, as currently drivers can only get on to the eastbound carriageway and off the westbound side there.

Fareham Borough Council leader Sean Woodward and Hampshire County Council leader Keith Mans, alongside Mark Thistlethwayte, chairman of Welborne development company Buckland, have written to Boris Johnson to warn that the entire development is ‘under threat’.

The letter states: ‘The delivery of Welborne Garden Village is under threat unless government funding can be found as a matter of urgency.

‘Without urgent funding support from the government the whole development could be stalled for a considerable while.’

The government was not in a position to turn down the request without essentially scrapping the entire project, according Cllr Woordward.

He said: ‘The unfortunate thing is that I had to literally wait for Department for Transport funding to time out - there was no way on earth that money was going to be spent.

‘This is an issue we often have with grant funding that put timescales on when it can be spent.

‘With a project the size of Welborne you really can't do that.

‘The craziness of the situation is that I had to wait for the clock to tick until we got a point where the LEP said ‘you're definitely not going to spend it by then’.

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The lobbying of central government has also seen Fareham MP Suella Braverman write to the Department of Transport and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in attempt to secure more money.

The soaring cost of the infrastructure project – estimated at £30m in 2017 – and the current economic turmoil had to ‘call into question the viability of the development’, according to Fareham Borough Councillor Shaun Cunningham, who has repeatedly questioned the plans for the garden village.

He said: ‘It is coming on for five years since the public inquiry on Welborne, and in that community groups said the time scale was absolutely unrealistic.

‘They were proven right.

‘It’s always been on the fringe of viability, and the cost of the junction 10 works has increased threefold – what about the other costs?

‘It has to call into question the viability of the development.’

A message from the Editor, Mark Waldron

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