Cash-strapped Liverpool Council is set to fork out an additional £7m on the development of a south Liverpool housing site where costs will balloon to £60m before work on building a single property has even begun.
Remediation work at the contaminated Festival Gardens site in the south of the city is already budgeted to cost a staggering £52 million before a housing developer even moves in to start building homes - but a new report shows costs have spiralled significantly beyond this.
Festival Gardens is a former tip site that was transformed, landscaped and planted up to become the home of the Liverpool International Garden Festival in 1984. The local authority spent £6m buying a section of the site in 2015 from Langtree - insisting at the time that the sale would only go through subject to site surveys and the correct due diligence being done. A year later the authority agreed to fund around £6m of site investigations on the former waste land.
