Bexley Council has been accused of wasting taxpayers’ money designing, consulting on and submitting a planning application before performing a U-turn.

Nags Head Lane Car Park was earmarked for new housing by the council’s development company BexleyCo before being removed from business plans earlier this year.

It came months after a scheme was submitted to planning officers, before being withdrawn.

BexleyCo was also planning on building at Wilde Road, before residents’ protests paired with flawed designs meant the council’s planning committee threw out the scheme.

At a scrutiny meeting last night, opposition leader Daniel Francis joined calls for the board of BexleyCo to be brought before councillors to explain why taxpayers’ money has been “wasted” without a single home being built.

“I don’t feel we have made a great deal of progress,” the Labour leader said.

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“I hear very clearly about the important thing being the finances, but we brought forward an application for Wilde Road, spent £250,000 public money on it and rejected it.

“We brought forward an application at Nags Head and again spent taxpayers’ money on consultations, architects and planning consultants and then withdrew it after we spent it.

“We’ve had an expensive managing director on a day rate, who left, an interim managing director, a new managing director who less than a year after his arrival has left.

“Hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money we have lent to a company and not a single spade has been put in the ground. We are lending money to pee up the wall quite frankly.”

The council has lent BexleyCo £300k since it was set up in 2017, and is hoping that it will turn over a profit for the authority by 2023.

It says BexleyCo will be important to its ambitious growth strategy – which proposes 31,000 homes by 2050.

Over the next four years, it’s expected that the council will lend BexleyCo £113m.

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West Street small car park, Felixstowe Road car park, 221 Erith Road and land at Lesney Park Road are in line to be developed by the company, with cabinet members hoping for progress soon.

Cllr David Leaf, the cabinet member for resources, said last night: “As with the setting up of any company there are challenges and there are risks ahead and that is what we are navigating through at the moment.

“There is work ongoing about the sites that haven’t gone through – we are keen to see the sites delivered at pace, there are legal issues with one of the sites as well.

“Planning is always a risk and a challenge as with any developer.”

It’s understood there were issues with the usage of Nags Head Lane not known when the plans were submitted.

Cllr Louie French, the deputy leader of the council, added: “We would be accused of something very different if proper scrutiny on a BexleyCo application hadn’t happened. We’d be accused of something else if things were just rubber-stamped.

“We’ve done a lot of work to look at where we are to make sure every single penny of public money is spent properly.”