Patience is running out at Swindon Borough Council with an unnamed major financial institution.

The company is the developer behind a planned 250-home estate set to be built in the centre of town.

The land is a cleared site in Kimmerfields north of the new Zurich building, on land bounded by Corporation Street and Manchester Road.

The borough council agreed to sell the land to the unnamed institution in a private and confidential session in October 2022. The details of the buyer and the amount the council will receive for the site has always been kept a secret.

But now councillors in both main parties are getting restive.

A planning application was expected for the deal early in 2023 but there has been no movement at all.

Leader of the Conservative opposition group, councillor Gary Sumner asked the cabinet member for finance councillor Kevin Small, who has responsibility for the council’s property holdings: “When do we pull the plug on this deal and put it out to the market?

“There would be more progress if I had to personally draft the Tabernacle stones to the site myself.”

Cllr Sumer’s quip about Tabernacle stones was a reference to the neo-classical portico to the old Tabernacle Baptist Chapel in Regent Street which were kept when the building was knocked down. The council now owns the stones and they are kept in storage at Wroughton airfield.

The council has long wanted a place in the town centre to put the stones back up.

Cllr Small agreed with Cllr Sumner that the wait was becoming too much.

He said: “This is a wonderful opportunity for the developer to build high-quality houses in the town centre.

“But we have not even got to a planning application.

“My patience is running out.”

The housing development is a major part of the regeneration of the Kimmerfields area - which in turn is meant to help regenerate the town centre.

When the deal between the council and the unnamed developer was being agreed the site was described as the 21st century equivalent of Railway Village - houses built near to where people work and shop and go out for leisure.

The council’s policy is to develop more of the town centre as mixed-use: a combination of housing, business and leisure uses to replace the declining retail sector, and revitalise the town with the shops, bars cafes and restaurants that the people living there need.