A property firm owned by Sir David Murray’s family has expressed confidence in the commercial prospects of its longstanding plans for a big housing development on a former open cast mine site in Lanarkshire after racking up more losses.
The New Brannock business is working on plans to develop land for housing next to its Torrance Park golf club near Newhouse in North Lanarkshire. These have been complicated by planning issues for around 20 years.
The business is owned by Murray Capital, which is chaired by former Rangers owner Sir David. It first applied for planning permission for the site in the 1990s.
Only around 50 houses have been built on the site so far, on land which Taylor Wimpey acquired in return for funding infrastructure.
New Brannock lost £1.6 million in 2015, taking the company’s accumulated deficit to £14.1m.
However Sir David’s son, David D Murray noted North Lanarkshire Council’s Planning Committee recently approved a local development plan, which includes a section of the New Brannock site. The land concerned has potential capacity for 689 housing units.
“This was extremely positive news,” noted Mr Murray.
He added: “As with all large developments of this nature, there is a requirement for significant upfront investment which the Group has made available ... We are pleased with overall progress to date and remain confident of realising the full profitable potential of New Brannock.”
The firm paid £1.4m interest last year on loans from other group companies.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here