MAXIM Park, the struggling Lanarkshire business park that is the biggest in Scotland, is the main target for a £600,000 proposed injection of public money for a new bus service that would staunch its owners' massive transport costs.

The park, which totals 756,000 square feet of office space but is only 13% occupied, is currently spending hundreds of thousands of pounds a year running well over 100 daily buses back and forth to Airdrie and Motherwell railway stations, despite there being too few employees at the park to make full use of them.

Backed by other smaller parks in the area, including the nearby new science centre BioCity, Maxim has persuaded Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT) to bid for a £300,000 grant from a Transport Scotland bus investment fund. With match-funding from SPT, this would buy a number of buses to operate on a new route likely to run between Airdrie and Motherwell, taking in other towns including Bellshill, Holytown and Wishaw.

This would enable Maxim to slash its annual transport costs which one source described as a "fortune". The bill to management company Arisaig is also thought to run to several hundred thousand pounds.

The 10-building business park, commissioned before the crash and completed in 2008, is thought to be bringing in very little income because its enterprise zone status has meant it has been able to offer very generous rent-free periods to its tenants. Maxim was listed this month by Property Week magazine as number three in the top 10 UK developments epitomising the pre-2008 boom.

Built on the site of the former Chunghwa Picture Tubes factory, it stands next to the successful Eurocentral industrial park. Although it has succeeded in attracting the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa) and heating group Vaillant in the last couple of years, and claims to have picked up several tenants recently, Maxim is still battling to disprove the criticism that the location is far more attractive to industrial tenants than those looking for office space.

The park was set up by a London-based fund called Tritax, whose investors are said to have included a number of prominent Scottish businessmen and celebrities. Rather than push the park into administration, lender Lloyds chose to take a £65 million hit on its £90m debt by offloading it to New York investment house Cerberus Capital Management more than two years ago.

Councillor David Fagan, regeneration convener at North Lanarkshire Council, insisted that the new bus initiative was not all about Maxim.

He said: "I met with BioCity recently and they expressed similar concerns around public transport, so it occurred to me that there might be some scope for looking at a service that served some of the big industrial parks in that location.

"If we provided that kind of route, we would open up the employment opportunities, particularly for poor areas that might otherwise struggle to get there, while making those sites more attractive for inward investment."

The plan recently received stage one approval from the Scottish Government, but is now being reconfigured to incorporate Strathclyde Business Park near Bellshill, even though it is around 90% full. It is understood that if the grant is approved, Maxim and SBP would both pay towards the cost of running the buses, with a view to them becoming sustainable after three years.

David Gebbie of Arisaig said the plan was about "bringing a whole series of community areas together", and insisted that the current private service would not be affected.

He said: "We have no problem with helping North Lanarkshire Council or SPT meet their social inclusion objectives at the same time as meeting our own objectives."