WORK on a £10.3m link road to a new enterprise zone near Bridgwater can begin after the district council voted to purchase the necessary land.

The former Royal Ordinance site at Huntspill, between the villages of Puriton and Woolavington, is to be transformed into a new hub for businesses.

The site’s new owner, Salamanca Group Topaz Limited (SGTL), was granted planning permission for the new “Energy Park” in November 2017 on the condition that a new access route be created to link the site to the A39.

Work on this road will be able to start soon, after Sedgemoor District Council voted to purchase all the land on which the new road will run.

The new road is needed to prevent an increase in traffic running through the two villages and along Woolavington Road, which links the two settlements to the 222-acre energy park.

The road will run from a new roundabout with the A39 along the southern edge of Puriton, across a new roundabout with Woolavington Road and then north to a further roundabout at the park entrance.

It is hoped that the energy park will eventually be home to between 50 and 150 businesses, with up to 4,000 people working on the site.

Claire Pearce, the council’s group manager for strategy and development, said in her written report: “The additional output generated by the site will effectively double Sedgemoor’s current growth rate over a 20-year period, with around £500m of additional benefit generated for the locality.”

SGTL has been negotiating with the four other principal landowners on whose land the road would be built, but Ms Pearce noted that this had 'not proved successful' in every case.

The council’s executive committee met in Bridgwater on Wednesday (April 25) to approve a compulsory purchase order – a mechanism which allows councils to buy parcels of lands if it is necessary for development or infrastructure.

Ms Pearce said that it was 'hoped that compulsory powers will not be required' and that the land could be acquired through negotiation with the landowners, adding that the order would 'ensure that the land can be acquired in a timely manner should negotiations not prove fruitful'.

Such an order could enable construction of the road to commence in earnest, in light of the fact that the money allocated for the project has to be spent by a certain date.

Out of the £10.3m needed to build the road, £6.3m will be funded by SGTL itself, which has been carrying out remedial work at the energy park since it acquired it from previous owner BAE Systems.

The remaining £3.9m will come from a grant by the Heart of the South West Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), which allocates funding for significant infrastructure projects in Somerset.

One of the conditions of the LEP’s grant is that £3.1m of the total has to be spent by April 2020, with the remaining £788,000 being available until April 2021.

If the council did not vote for the land to be purchased, the success of the energy park would rest on SGTL’s own negotiations with the landowners – and if these were to drag on, the LEP grant funding would expire.

Council leader Duncan McGinty said: “This is a major economic growth area for this council and is vital for improvements to the local area.”

The executive voted to approve the compulsory purchase of the land, with a view to these powers being used if and when negotiations with the landowners prove unsuccessful.

Somerset County Council, which is responsible for highways, has declined to comment on the time-scale for the new road being built, since the district council is leading the project with SGTL.