South Macclesfield Development Area: £10m grant signed away

Cheshire East Council has formally given up the £10m of government money that was meant to build the link road at the South Macclesfield Development Area. A decision signed on 7 August 2026 by Peter Skates, the council’s director of growth and enterprise, commits the council to a deed of termination with Homes England, completing its withdrawal from the Housing Infrastructure Fund programme for the site. The decision record was published on Monday 10 August. (Officer decision record, Cheshire East Council)

Not a penny of the grant was ever spent. The record states that “no grant has been drawn down to date”, that the availability period for the funding has ended, and that “the wider requirements of the grant will not be achieved”. It adds that Homes England itself wants the deed signed “so to maintain the Council’s constructive relationship with Homes England”, and that “there is no other realistic option”. (Decision record PDF)

The scheme the money was for

The South Macclesfield Development Area sits two miles south of the town centre, south of Moss Lane between Congleton Road and the West Coast Main Line. It has been earmarked for development since 1997 and was carried into the Cheshire East Local Plan in 2017. Outline permission was granted in 2019 for up to 950 houses, a primary school, a local retail centre and a new link road between Congleton Road and Moss Lane. The council owns roughly 55 per cent of the site and the housebuilder Barratt about 41 per cent. (South Macclesfield Development Area: Future Direction, Economy and Growth Committee report, June 2025)

The Housing Infrastructure Fund grant, awarded by Homes England, was to part fund that link road, with a contribution from the neighbouring landowner and the balance from the council’s own capital programme. The June 2025 committee report records that the cost of the road “substantially increased due to construction inflation and technical issues”, that the grant expired, and that the road “is unlikely to be delivered as part of any alternative proposal for the site”.

What sank the wider scheme is under the ground. The site is underlain by peat of varying depths, next to the Danes Moss Site of Special Scientific Interest, and hosts willow tits, an endangered bird. In 2021 Natural England asked for further information on the plans, describing the peat as a “precious and irreplaceable resource with the potential to act as a vast carbon store”. Local opposition organised around the Save Danes Moss campaign, which has since become the registered charity the Danes Moss Trust. On 3 June 2025 the council’s Economy and Growth Committee concluded the approved plans “cannot be fully reconciled” with its own peat and carbon policies, agreed to drop them, approved £150,000 for a review of alternative options, resolved to withdraw the outstanding reserved matters applications, and approved the withdrawal from the fund that has now been completed. (Committee report; agenda for 3 June 2025)

The money now at stake is the council’s own

The sharpest lines in the new decision record come from the council’s own finance officer. The scheme sits in the capital programme as project CAP-10005 with a budget of £34.629m. Giving up the grant means the council must either find an alternative source of funding or cut that budget “by the corresponding £10m”. And if the project does not continue at all, the £3.293m the council has already spent promoting the site would have to be written off against its revenue budget, the budget that pays for day to day services. (Decision record PDF, finance implications)

The finance comments describe the project as “in something of a holding pattern” with minimal current spend, and say it would be “premature to end the capital scheme at this stage” because an options paper is being written on the site’s short and medium term future. That paper is taking longer than first suggested: the June 2025 report promised the options review back before the committee “later in the 2025-26 municipal year”, and the council’s own project page said a report on alternatives was expected in early 2026. As of the finance sign off in July 2026, it was still in progress. (South Macclesfield Development Area, cheshireeast.gov.uk)

What it means for you

Nothing changes on the ground this week. The site was already in limbo after the June 2025 decision; this deed is the legal full stop on the grant, not a new plan. The decision is subject to call-in by councillors until 17 August 2026, after which it takes effect.

Do not read this as the end of development south of Macclesfield. The site is still allocated for housing in the Local Plan and still counts toward the borough’s housing supply, and the June 2025 report is explicit that abandoning it would push “development pressure on non-allocated, less sustainable locations”. The direction the council has signalled is a smaller number of homes on the least sensitive parts of the site, paired with peat restoration on the rest. The options report, whenever it lands, is the document to watch, and we will report it when it is published. New applications for the area will appear in the weekly lists we track on our Macclesfield planning news page.

The link road was also meant to relieve traffic between Congleton Road and Moss Lane, so its loss matters to drivers as much as to housebuilders; for what is actually happening on the roads now, see Macclesfield roadworks and travel. And with around 950 once-planned homes now uncertain, the wider supply picture feeds into what homes cost in Macclesfield.