Stafford Market Square improvement plans revealed

Stafford Borough Council is being awarded the cash as part of the Future High Streets Fund to boost town centres across the country.

The authority had bid for £23.8m for an “optimum” project list and £20.8m for a “core” set. But in December it was announced that Stafford would receive 69 per cent of the core funding requested towards proposals to boost the northern part of the town centre.

On Tuesday the council’s economic development and planning scrutiny committee heard that the main reason it had not received all the funds requested was because the scheme was "oversubscribed”.

The council is now considering how its proposed projects can be delivered with the reduced amount of funding. Developments are set to focus on commercial, food and beverage, residential and public realm improvements.

An image of how Market Square could be improved was presented to committee members at Tuesday’s meeting.

Councillor Bryan Cross said: “I saw something on Facebook where there are people living in Stafford setting up all sorts of wonderful ideas and projects towards this. But I think the money we were awarded was for the case we put forward, therefore in theory they’re wasting their time because they can’t ask for the things that their wish list defines.

“Is part of our submission the enhancements of the Market Square?”

Council officer Michelle Smith confirmed that improvements to the central Market Square area were one of the four projects being proposed.

Stipulation

She said: “It was a stipulation of the fund that we weren’t allowed to put forward projects that were termed as ‘beautification’, which is essentially doing repairs to things. There had to be an almost functional change to spaces.

“The surfacing is able to support a higher number of events to take place in the town centre. It’s more able to withstand higher footfall, which will hopefully deal with the maintenance issues going forwards. It’s taking what we know works, which is that open space, and making it fit for purpose in the long term.

“Another idea we’ve put forward is the facility to have little pop-up units that can sit around the edges of the square; very similar to what we do with our markets now, but something that’s a bit more sustainable in the long term.

“As we go through the next stage of the process we will be able to share more with the community so they can have an input and a say.”

She added that works suggested on Facebook and other social media sites had referred to some maintenance-related issues.

Referring to the Future High Streets Fund schemes she said: “We want to be clear that these are capital projects and it’s based on the submission we made way back in June last year. We had to say how we thought we could spend the money.

“Going back to the original prospectus for the fund it’s about re-purposing vacant retail space to try and regenerate life within the town centres. It’s quite a specific brief we have to meet.

“It’s not a case we will get awarded the £14.3m and then start thinking about how we are going to spend it. There are very specific projects that we have drawn up for this, it’s just we’re not currently in a position to be able to show what those are until we’ve got the funding confirmed.

“That doesn’t mean we’re not interested in what people have to say and what they’d like to see – we absolutely do want to do that and it’s a yes please for people to talk to us about how they’d like to be involved with the projects going forward.”