Here’s a thread about Little Stanion, S106 agreements, viability assessments and the cost to the taxpayer of #Corby /1 https://twitter.com/ntelegraph/status/1280757945890897928

Little Stanion (LS) is a 1,000-ish home development on the edge of Corby. It was given planning permission in 2006 but, like so many schemes in Corby of that era, it’s still not finished. /2

Corby Council’s planning committee will meet tonight to discuss whether to rip up an agreement it made with LS owner JME Developments to pay £2.079m in S106 money. /3

JME says it won’t make enough profit on the final 189 homes on the estate to make them worth building. (It’s already said no further affordable housing will be built) /4

But JME Developments didn’t ever mean to get involved in owning Little Stanion. They were originally just contracted to build the roads but were given the development after the previous owner Silentpride (owned by BeLa, you might remember them) ran into trouble /5

BeLa couldn’t afford to pay JME the £1.85m it owed them for roadworks they’d done so handed over Silentpride, and consequently the whole of Little Stanion to JME. Silentpride immediately went bust and infrastructure work stopped for four years /6

(An explanation of section 106 agreements. It’s the money a developer pays the council to provide infrastructure to support the new community. Things like parks, schools, roads, surgeries, cycle paths.. Sometimes the developer just builds the stuff itself instead of paying) /7

In 2015 JME came to Corby Council and said they couldn’t make the £6m in S106 payments to provide football pitches, schools, cycle paths and other facilities. They asked to renegotiate agreement. Corby Council threatened legal action. /8

The two sides were told to mediate. They did, and in 2016 came up with a new agreement which meant JME would have to pay CBC an £11,000 ‘roof tax’ for each property sold. There were public meetings, many objections, arguments and reports produced. But a £2m agreement was made /9

And it’s this agreement that JME now stays it can’t stick to. It’s asked Corby Council to free it of its obligations or else it will only make £1.2m on the remainder of the development. It wants to make £5m, which it says is an acceptable return. /10

It says build costs have gone up and house prices at LS have not risen as fast as it would have liked. So instead of clawing back some of the profit from marketing costs, fees etc, it’s clawing it back from its obligations to Corby taxpayers /11

Bear in mind that this £5m profit is just on the final phases of the development. We don’t know what JME has made on the previous phases of Little Stanion. The company also took out a bridging loan on the land in question back in May. Here’s its latest balance sheet. /12

If Corby Council agree to the changes then it will mean the developer has no obligation to pay back the £2m (which has already been spent by NCC, on building a school for Little Stanion which is ‘good’, which in itself will raise the prices of houses on the development). /13

JME will also not have to finish any of the roads to an adoptable standard.

So why don’t CBC just tell them to stuff it and say no to the changes to the S106 agreement? /14

Well. JME’s bargaining chip is the community hall and four shops which are part of the final phases. JME says it will build the community hall at a cost of £800,000 alongside the houses. But if they can’t build the houses they won’t build the shops and the community hall. /15

And the people of LS will be left with a temporary shop and a village hall currently house in the estate’s ‘Welcome Centre’ (which is basically a marketing suite). /16

As I said earlier, the last time this happened there were public meetings and objections and anger. This time, the documents were uploaded to the council’s planning portal only 4 weeks ago in the middle of a pandemic. CBC has only held one other meeting in the past 3 months /17

In 2016 the documents in the agenda totalled 85 pages. This time? 5 pages. We don’t even know for sure what the lost £2m would pay for because the detail isn’t included. The agenda was only put online on Monday. Seems rushed.

There were no objections as of last night. /18

As of yesterday, NCC hadn’t commented on the plan but today their reply has been uploaded. They’re objecting. /19

And the galling thing is, this has happened with every single major development in a Corby during the past two decades. At Oakley Vale, the developer Cofton went bust before roads could be finished. Corby Council stepped in to help /20

At Priors Hall, the S106 has been renegotiated more times than I care to remember and developer BeLa (same original owners as Little Stanion) went bust. Millions has been lost to the taxpayer. The last time they renegotiated their S106 in 2019, this is what councillors said.. /21

Kingswood’s redevelopment had to be bailed out by millions in government money when it hit the skids.

And at West Corby, where ground hasn’t yet been broken, owners (Great Oakley and Rockingham Castle) said building affordable homes wouldn’t make them ‘enough’ profit /22

Corby Council have tough housing targets to meet. They originally set out on their growth agenda many years ago with the aim of the population growth being balanced out by the investment that would be made in the town’s infrastructure. /23

Someone’s making a profit out of our town. It ain’t me. It ain’t you. /24