Thursday April 13th 2023
East Lothian Council is to spend up to £100,000 on a new masterplan for the former Cockenzie Power Station – seven years after it spent £150,000 on the first one.
The local authority says the latest masterplan will be a ‘technical’ one which will help it plan how to spend more than £11 million in Levelling Up Funding awarded to the site by the UK Government at the start of the year.
And it insists the original masterplan, which was created after months of community consultations, remains important as the future for the coastal site is laid out.
The council has put the contract for the work out for bids with an estimated cost of £100,000 which will come out of its own budget.
The contract notice states the local authority requires “a masterplanner to undertake a technical masterplan of the former Cockenzie Power Station site to identify options for how the site could be divided into development parcels and serviced for future economic development uses.
“This will then be used to inform council decisions about the development potential of the site, how it can be taken forward as well as informing marketing of the site for development.”
The council bought the site from ScottishPower in 2018 and has been marketing it for employment opportunities since then.
Two years prior to taking over ownership a public consultation was carried out to draw up the original masterplan which included zones for green energy production, leisure and employment.
The Levelling Up Funding received by the council will be used to make the site developable with work to remove bunds, infill the hole left by the power station building and former cooling ducts, repair the sea wall and make flood improvements and improve the John Muir Way which crosses the site.
A council spokesperson said: “The original masterplan remains an important high level visionary document on how the site could be redeveloped.
“What it does not do, however, is identify how the site can be redeveloped from a technical perspective including servicing, and splitting the site into attractive development parcels.
“Following our successful bid for Levelling Up funding, the technical masterplan will now factor in the important changes to the site as a result of the preparatory works funded by that bid.
“There will be community engagement as part of the process of developing this technical masterplan. A further report on the next stages will be taken to the meeting of full Council in June.”
Bids for the new contract close next month.
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