Worcestershire hospital trust makes legal claim for housing money

Worcestershire's hospitals wanted money to pay for future health services

A hospital trust is taking three councils to court over claims it should have received money from housing developers.

Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust asked the local authorities to request £1.84m from Welbeck Land, when the company applied to build homes in the county.

Worcester City Council, Wychavon District Council and Malvern Hills District Council all turned them down.

A court hearing will be held in July.

Local authorities usually ask for money from housing developers when they submit large-scale plans and the money is used to pay for local infrastructure.

The hospital trust believed it should also have benefited from some of this section 106 funding when plans for 2,200 homes, south of Worcester were submitted.

NHS trusts are entitled to make these requests, with the extra population expected to result in growing needs for health services.

But when the plans for land between St Peter's and Kempsey were submitted, the three councils argued that negotiating more money from the developers would probably require a concession on the number of affordable homes being built, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.

They said they did not want to do that.

The hospital trust made a similar request for £3.4m in 2019, which was also turned down, for fear of upsetting negotiations.

A judge will now decide at a hearing in London whether the councils had acted lawfully when rejecting the request.