How will the £16.5 million Hoylake Golf Resort highway improvements be funded?

                                               

On the 22nd December 2017 I announced I was taking a Christmas break from blogging and Wirral Council released further information about the costs of the roads associated with the proposed Hoylake Golf Resort. It was also released a few days after Cabinet’s decision to loan the developer £26 million if a planning application is successful.

In fact Wirral Council’s request to the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority for £1.65 million towards the costs of the roads had previously been covered by this blog.

The information released splits the road upgrades into three schemes. Scheme A is the new link road (this runs from Saughall Massie Road to Hoylake), scheme B is an upgrade to Saughall Massie Road and scheme C is an upgrade to Heron Road.

Scheme A is estimated at £7.9 million, scheme B at £5.8 million and scheme C at £2.8 million.

However, just as the estimated cost of a fire station at Saughall Massie rose over the course of the project from £4 million to £5 million, I’ll point out the caveat that the costs of these highways improvements were estimated in September 2016.

According to this Cabinet report ground works are not estimated to be started until February to March 2019. It puzzles me as to why that table lists the ground works as starting before the grant of planning permission in June 2019.

Replacing two of the Four Bridges cost an estimated £7-8 million (a project which is facing delays) and was only possible with a £6.4 million grant from the Department of Transport and a £142,000 contribution from Peel Ports Group Limited.

So, in the absence of any known funding for the roads associated with the Hoylake Golf Resort, the question is where does the £16.5 million come from to pay for it?

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