Eighty-five new homes will be built on land surrounding the Mallard Complex in the Forest.
Developer Infinity was given outline permission for the scheme last year, but could not proceed with construction until the Development & Planning Authority had signed off on detailed plans.
The company was officially informed yesterday that those plans had now been approved and work on site will start in about a month.
The first phase will be the erection of a 4m-high acoustic fence to mitigate any impact from the work on Le Rondin School.
Managing director Paul Nobes said that the scheme would make an important contribution to tackling the island’s housing shortage.
‘The current Island Development Plan doesn’t really allow for a huge amount of new development in the island and so it stifles us a bit,’ he said.
‘So, when we identified this as a possible site which would be relatively straight forward to develop, we used a special planning procedure where we had to show that this is an exceptional circumstance and that there isn’t enough residential development going on. We started those discussions with the DPA 16 months ago and we will be starting on site by month 17.’
Mr Nobes was full of praise for the assistance he received with the project from the senior planning team at the DPA, and several politicians, including Policy & Resources president Lindsay de Sausmarez and former DPA president Victoria Oliver.
Sixty-nine of the new homes will be delivered under the States’ affordable housing development programme. They will not be for sale but will instead be offered for rent or partial ownership by a social landlord, and the Guernsey Housing Association has previously said it intends to take up an option on all the units.
The other 16 properties will be available for sale on the private market. Mr Nobes said this sort of mixed tenure approach was not only desirable from the point of view of achieving a social mix, but it also enabled more cost-effective delivery of affordable housing.
‘We will be able to deliver the 69 units to the GHA at somewhere between 22% and 34% below their market value, and we would like to replicate that sort of joint venture approach on some of the sites we are interested in under the focused IDP review.
‘There are several sites that, if they are approved after the inspector’s report is issued, could be a mix of private and affordable housing, and a mixture of 30% private and 70% affordable would allow those developments to be viable.’
One initial concern of the Mallard scheme was the impact on the neighbouring special needs school but Infinity said it had been in constant dialogue with the school and believed it had managed to address all of those concerns. There will be a wide mix of property sizes within the social rental element of the new development with a high number of one-bed units, but also five larger homes of four and even five bedrooms, to address a long-standing problem of insufficient properties to suit large families within either the States Housing or GHA portfolios.
The affordable housing part of the development is expected to be completed within three and a half years, with the private homes taking a further six months to be completed.