£18m handout to Selly Oak super hospital link road

Mar 17 2009 by Joanne Travis, Birmingham Post

Birmingham City Council has stepped in with an emergency £18 million handout to allow a new link road to the Selly Oak super hospital to be completed.

The council hopes to get the money back from the Government, but was forced to make the payment in order to get work underway and make sure that the dual carriageway can be completed by October 2011 - when the hospital is due to open.

Phase one of the £63 million road will open this month.

But with a tight timetable which involves closing the main cross-city rail line for four days in December 2010 while construction work takes place, the council could not afford to run the risk of further delays in preparatory work for phase two.

Cabinet members were warned that, without the handout, Birmingham could run the risk of having the super hospital open without direct road access for at least nine months.

Council officials expect to get the £18 million back from the government’s Regional Funding Allocation - a £1 billion pot for public sector projects in the West Midlands. But a decision will not be made until June.

If the RFA bid is unsuccessful, the council will have to recover the money from other transport projects or from cash reserves.