Wates appointed to Castle Mills apartment contract.

See the source imageThe Council has taken a step forward towards delivering the £28 million apartment block scheduled to be built on the former Castle Mills car park site.

A report approved yesterday says,

“In October 2020 the council’s Executive approved the delivery strategy for the Castle Gateway regeneration. As part of this decision, approval was granted to undertake a procurement exercise to appoint a construction contractor to build Castle Mills on a two stage tender process.

The first stage of the process is to secure a construction contractor to develop the current RIBA Stage 3 design prepared by BDP to RIBA Stage 4 on Pre-Construction Service Contract Agreement (PSCA) and provide a tender price for undertaking the construction based on that stage 4 design.

The Council received three strong bids following an invite to tender through an open market process, which were assessed and scored on both price and quality, with Wates being the successful bidder. The council will now enter in to the PSCA stage of the contract”.

The officials concerned are keen to point out that the decision does not commit the Council to proceeding with the whole of the Castle Gateway scheme which has been costed at £55 million.

Of this, current plans are for the Council to borrow £45 million.

195 new apartments for Hungate

A planning application for the next phase of the Hungate development has been submitted to the Council.

Click here for details

Hungate phase 2

The Foss side application – a mix of 1, 2 and 3 bedroomed flats – is unexceptional save in one respect.

No offer is made of affordable units either on site or off site.

Instead a viability study is being prepared which will indicate “at a later date” what – if any – “affordable units” can be provided.

A precedent for a zero affordable contribution was established by a planning inspector who determined a York planning appeal recently.

The design of the flats proposed suggests that they would not address social housing needs anyway (although most of the waiting list is now made up of residents seeking 1 bedroomed accommodation).

If this means that payment to the Council, in lieu of homes, is planned then that could be a step forward.

As we have pointed out previously, there are many properties for sale in the City for around £100,000.

If the Council was a “cash in hand” purchaser they could buy up some of these and make an immediate impact on the housing waiting list.

The last batch of Hungate properties were relatively expensive (starting at over £200,000 for a small flat).

So the willingness of the developer to proceed with the next stage does provide further evidence that the country’s economic recovery is gaining momentum in York.