An affordable housing development could be a step closer on the Isle of Wight – on the site of a former primary school.
It comes as the Isle of Wight Council agreed to dispose of land at Berry Hill in Lake, which was the former home of the Island Learning Centre and Broadlea Primary School.
In 2015, the building was destroyed by fire and was thought at the time to be the subject of a suspected arson attack.
The authority was awarded £619,500 in 2021, by the government to carry out work on the 3.7-acre site to make it suitable for housing.
A condition of the funding was it must be released for housing by the end of March 2024.
The council marketed the site last year but did not receive any suitable proposals so it approached registered housing providers on the Island to see if any would be willing to build affordable housing. Since the fire, the building was demolished. The site, consisting of grass and hard standings, has been empty ever since.
A bid was received and in a delegated decision published on Thursday the council leader, Lora Peacey-Wilcox, has approved to dispose of the site to ‘Bidder 3’.
The bidder is not named in the council report but is said to have a track record of building and managing affordable homes on the Island. The council said it was confident the housing would be high quality and Bidder 3 was ideally placed to manage the properties effectively as they have an office on the Island.
It says the bidder’s vision for the site is ‘to create a sustainable, diverse and futureproofed housing scheme that responds to the environmental, social and economic challenges facing new schemes on the Island.’
There is no current planning permission for the site but it is thought it would be able to hold between 30 and 45 dwellings. The funding from government could be used towards site preparation costs incurred by the developer.
The council says disposing of the site will save money as it will not have to pay for maintenance or upkeep costs in the future.
That’s it, keep building those houses, even though the birth rate on the Island is declining dramatically, and the Council were even considering closing schools because of it.
Perhaps our local newspapers should be asking the Council who these ‘affordable’ houses are actually being built for?
More cramped homes for benefit breeders to fill, which will create the need for the school, so adding to future costs to our council tax.
Great.
They are being built for young island adults.
The idea is that giving them a chance to live and work on the Island, the decline in the Island’s birth rate might be reversed.
The alternative is an island of old people with nobody to care for them.
Well, there will be people to care for them, but they won’t be Island born. In fact they probably won’t be UK born.
Guess you are OK with that?
The real problem is the 1000s of unaffordable properties being built, marketed on the mainland and sold to people to move the Island for their retirement. This is only exacerbating the above problem. Moving people who are going to need care in 15 to 20 years while the people to care for them are being forced to move away is idiotic.