RECENTLY built town centre flats can’t be moved into – because an electrical substation has not been installed.
A five-storey block of 11 flats has been built on Cabbage Patch car park at the end of St Stephen’s Road, Bournemouth town centre.
Most of the 27 spaces provided at the car park have been lost because of the development, although there are nine spaces underneath the building for people who will move in.
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But according to PDP Architecture, the development cannot be completed and handed over to landowners and applicants BCP Council until a substation has been installed.
A planning application has been submitted to BCP Council and will be decided at a later date.
The architects said: “The development is yet to be completed and can’t be handed over to the end user (BCP Council) until the substation is installed to serve the development.”
They added: “The reason for these amendments is totally driven by providing the servicing equipment as required by the utility supplier to enable the development to be services.
“It remains the applicant’s aim to produce a high-quality development.”
Full approval for the £2.369m project was given in 2020.
Around 65 per cent of the total scheme cost will be funded through capital receipts, housing revenue account (HRA) reserves and s106 contributions.
A further £815,000 of prudential borrowing was required within the HRA to fund the rest, repaid over a period of 50 years.
BCP Council said in a report in 2020 that after 50 years, the scheme will generate a surplus of around £75,000 per year.
The land, next to the Wessex Way, has been used as a car park since the 1970s and most recently by the council for staff parking.
The authority’s estates department looked at costs to sell off the land and valued it could be sold for £350,000 - but this never happened because it “would not deliver the wider corporate aims around housing need and homelessness”.
Seven of the flats are one-bedroom, with the remaining four having two bedrooms.
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