Council leader welcomes £2.25m housing investment

The money, provided by the Government’s Housing Infrastructure Fund, comes from a total investment of £866 million which will fund 133 council-led housing projects across the country.

The schemes are designed to help build up to 200,000 new homes across the country by 2022.

In Hastings, the £2.25 million has been allocated to a project – run by Hastings Borough Council – to build 390 new homes and to put forward a bid for a new sports village in the town.

Council leader Peter Chowney said: “We are very pleased to have received confirmation of the £2.25m funding from Homes England, which was in respect of the bid that we submitted with the developers of the proposed new sports village and housing scheme at Bexhill Road.

“The £2.25m will go some way to meeting the costs of the infrastructure required in order to bring the project forward. In particular it will enable the developers to carry out remediation measures necessary to help prevent future flooding in the area and help safeguard existing residents homes where this has been a constant risk in the past.

“The developers are now looking to secure a major housebuilding partner before seeking the necessary planning approvals required for the project to proceed.”

The Government funding comes less than a month after multi-million pound plans to create a huge new state-of-the-art sports complex in St Leonards hit a major setback as developer Keepmoat Homes decided to pull out for ‘commercial reasons’.

The proposals were first unveiled in November 2016, which would give Hastings United Football Club a 3,000 capacity stadium, and a new home for Hastings & St Leonards Priory Cricket Club and South Saxons Hockey Club.

The complex would be situated in the middle two tiers of the existing Bexhill Road playing fields.

There would be a four-court sports hall, a gym for sports, fitness and healthy living activities and a dance studio, together with meeting rooms and full catering facilities.

A planning application was expected to be formally submitted at the start of this year but a spokesman for Keepmoat Homes said they had ‘no plans to build in Hastings’.