Huge development pushed back as council accused of 'doing too much behind closed doors'

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

The decision on the long-awaited development at Prince's Gate in Oldham has been questioned after councillors raised concerns about ‘insufficient information’ and decisions they claim have been 'made behind closed doors’.

Previous attempts to develop the brownfield site in Oldham Mumps, currently used as a car park, have fallen through. But last month, the town hall's cabinet made the decision to transform the site into 295 new flats as part of a town centre masterplan to build 2,000 new homes.

That decision has now been called into question after reports were pulled into a scrutiny meeting for discussion. Oldham Lib Dem councillor Sam Al-Hamdani, who 'called in' the issue, said: “We challenged how the cabinet arrived at these decisions.

There was insufficient information in the reports to justify the decisions that were made – and the scrutiny committee agreed with us. “We also want to know why more of the reports about these decisions is not public.