THE effects of the credit crunch threaten to hover over the changing face of Penrith. As we report this week, the multi-million pound New Squares development has been given final approval by Eden Council and plans have been submitted for 800 new homes in the High Carleton area over the next 10 years.

But behind the headlines lurk fears that the economic situation could interfere gravely with plans to rejuvenate and revitalise the market town.

While the council has approved final details of New Squares, the decision came only after developer Lowther Manelli successfully sought a variation to the agreement it had reached with Eden. Press and public were excluded from the discussions during which that decision was taken, but it must have been a major departure from the original agreement for one councillor, John Lynch, to write in forceful terms to this newspaper. His letter, in which he refers to the developer “bleating” about changes to the money market, is printed on the adjoining page.

The council is a willing participant in the New Squares scheme, but if talks have taken place which might have a bearing on the public purse, the public needs to be privy to them. Transparency is what is needed, not secrecy.

Meanwhile, a financial cloud hangs over Persimmon Homes’ proposals for what it terms an “urban extension” to the High Carleton area. In the week that it submitted detailed plans to Eden, the housebuilder — Britain’s biggest — also announced that it was imposing a freeze on all new developments until the mortgage market picks up.

One important factor is, of course, that neither of these massive schemes will be completed overnight — at least two years in the case of New Squares, five times that before all the planned new homes would be built — and their promoters must have their fingers crossed that trading conditions drastically improve within the next 12 months or so.

This newspaper believes that Penrith needs New Squares and all that it entails (new supermarket, shops, houses, jobs, car park and a new football stadium) more than it needs an urban expansion into the green fields surrounding the town, especially as no detailed studies seem to be been carried out as yet into the effects on the town’s infrastructure, particularly the existing education and health care systems, of such a potentially massive influx of people.