Council houses in Wolverhampton have taken so long to build the site has overgrown again
A plan to build council houses in Wolverhampton has taken so long that the site cleared five years ago has now overgrown again.
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Wolverhampton Council has finally approved plans to build just six homes on land off Myatt Avenue in Parkfields but years of delays mean the overgrown hedges and shrubs cleared when the land was flattened in 2019 has been allowed to grow back.
The land off Myatt Avenue was stripped in 2019 after being earmarked as a potential site for affordable housing. The homes were expected to have been built in 2020 and 2021, according to a council announcement, but the work never started.
The council said the homes in Myatt Avenue were part of a “wider, phased affordable housing delivery programme” and the delay was caused by a change in building regulations and the site needing redesigning.
A planning application for seven homes was approved in 2020, amended in 2022 and then not approved for another six months until 2023. Another application was then put forward in June and approved this month.
A spokesperson for Wolverhampton Council said: “This development was part of a wider, phased affordable housing delivery programme, during which the council re-evaluated the delivery of each site.
“The site south of Myatt Avenue is complex and together with a change to building regulations there was a need to amend the footprint of the site to make it slightly larger.
“This meant the development needed redesigning to comply and resulted in a new planning application being submitted.”
A number of flats were built on the land – an old mineshaft entrance for the Rough Hills Colliery – in the 1950s but “severely” subsided and were demolished in the 1990s, remaining empty since.
Myatt Avenue was one of a dozen ‘small sites’ that the Wolverhampton Council identified for social housing four years ago as part of £8 million plans to build more than 50 new homes. This followed schemes that saw more than 100 new homes built.
Earlier this month, the council approved its own planning application to demolish the old Parkfield housing office in Rough Hills Road, a stone’s throw from Myatt Avenue, to make way for six three-bed affordable homes.
The former district offices, built in the 1990s, were deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ by the council in 2022 having been empty for three years – becoming a hotspot for vandalism, attempted break-ins, damage to roof tiles and fly-tipping.
