The new A50 junction south of Derby paving way for 4,500 homes and 5,000 jobs - costs and start date revealed

The cost of a new A50 junction south of Derby, paving the way for 4,500 homes and 5,000 jobs, has skyrocketed to more than £70 million – and work could start as soon as next month.

An East Midlands Combined County Authority report details that the A50 junction project, including a link road to Infinity Park, is now priced at £70.4 million – nearly double its original budget – and is due to start in March.

Derbyshire County Council has bid for £1.5 million from the combined authority to kickstart the scheme.

It now says the project is due for completion in March 2029.

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The initial cost of the junction, granted planning approval in 2021, was £37.5 million, and work had been due to start in 2023 and be complete by “early 2025”, which later shifted to early 2024 to mid-2025. 

In October 2021, the Government awarded £49.6 million to the county council to fund the project, which had increased in price to £55.6 million.

Since then, apart from the council assembling land to get the project under way, the scheme has been left in limbo for more than two years, with there appearing to be nothing to show as far as spades in the ground on the site.

Planning permissions are supposed to lapse after three years, which for the A50 junction would have been April 2024, but variation and discharge of condition applications are still being filed and are pending with the city council.

A combined authority report details: “The ultimate project comprises delivery of a new junction on the A50 Trunk Road plus a distributor road between this and infrastructure (existing plus under construction) within Infinity Park Derby, facilitating delivery of up to 4,500 homes and 3.45m square feet of commercial floorspace. 

“Pre-construction activity is currently constrained to a budget derived from the Levelling Up Fund grant and is focused upon completion of design but excludes a number of other work packages. 

“Additional resources would allow scaling-up of activity, reducing mobilisation delays and potentially contributing to earlier delivery and benefit realisation. 

“The funding will contribute to the development of the business case for the capital works which unlocks other public funding and the capacity for the developments to take place.”

The county council details in its pitch for combined authority funding: “Without EMCCAs intervention through the investment fund the project will not be able to proceed to final business case stage and therefore put at risk the ability to unlock significant central government funding for the delivery of the project. 

“This also compromises the ability to deliver the amount of housing and employment space in one of the area’s most significant development sites.”

The business case indicates that “phase one” of the project will cost £6.9 million.

A total of 5,000 new jobs are also set to be provided through a huge 290-acre extension to the Infinity Park business estate and Rolls-Royce, linking it to the A50, as part of the Infinity Garden Village plans, which have been decades in the making.

Planning permission for 1,850 homes on the site was submitted in 2019 and has yet to be decided.

In total, 4,500 homes had been earmarked as part of the village but now South Derbyshire District Council is in the process of adding a further 2,000 to this total, off Infinity Park Way up to the Lowes Lane Clay Shooting Ground, in a bid to help Derby City Council meet its unmet annual housing targets.

A 15-acre secondary school accommodating 1,230 pupils was supposed to be built near Lowes Farm, off Infinity Park Way, to open in 2023, at an original cost of £30 million.

However, a district council meeting was told in August that the school could be delayed to September 2027 and could be moved to a different site.

The further 2,000-home extension would also include an extra 173-acre employment site, a retirement village, a two-form primary school and a retirement village.

Healthcare facilities improvements are expected to be made through expansion at the current Sinfin Health Centre.

The planned expansion of the Sinfin Health Centre into a super centre called a Cavell Centre has been paused indefinitely, NHS officials have said. 

That plan was announced in April 2021, with the facility to have opened last August, with district councillors told in October 2023 that the once super-centre could be reduced in both size and breadth of services offered, with funding having been paused since January 2023.

A county council spokesperson said: “We continue to work with our partners as this infrastructure project remains a priority, bringing forward up to 4,500 new homes and 3.45 million sq ft of new commercial floorspace.

“However, as can often be the case with large construction projects, the delivery programme has experienced delays and we are awaiting confirmation from Government that the revised timescales are agreed.

“Inflation has also impacted the estimated cost of the project so the news that the East Midlands Combined County Authority is proposing to contribute £1.5 million towards the scheme is very welcome and will help keep the work progressing.”

Derby City Council said it had nothing further to add to the county council’s statement.