Bilston market stallholders offered two months free rent after delays to regeneration scheme

City of Wolverhampton Council said it will cut rent for indoor and outdoor market traders in Bilston by 100 per cent from December 22 to February 14 because of the delayed improvement works.

The Labour-run Black County local authority said it would result in £118,000 lost income which would be covered in the budget by using the council’s reserves.

The council has already cut rent by a quarter for more than 10 months to help Bilston’s indoor and outdoor market stalls during the delayed work.

The town’s outdoor market stalls were re-located last October for the then proposed year-long work to build a ‘state-of-the-art’ replacement.

However, the work to the 200-year-old market is now not expected to be finished until June 2026 – eight months later than planned.

The decision to relocate the town’s outdoor market also hit trade at its indoor market with stallholders complaining of a drop in footfall.

The council has already agreed a further £2.5m for the new market which sees the total cost rise by more than a third from £6.4m to £8.9m.

However despite the rise in the cost, several features of the multi-million-pound improvements to Bilston Market have been scrapped.

City of Wolverhampton Council approved its own planning application in November making a number of changes to its much-delayed and over budget improvements to Bilston’s outdoor market.

A proposed 12-metre ‘beacon’ and a number of benches and planters have been removed from the market’s designs and plans for solar panels and new signs and entrances have also been scrapped.

Some pavements, thoroughfares and car parks would also be cleaned and repaired rather than resurfaced.

Stallholders were told to prepare to be back on the new site by October this year but the delays meant the market celebrated its bicentennial as a building site.

The old outdoor market had been flattened but was left as a pile of rubble for months as work ground to a halt following a number of tricky surveys.

The council said surveys, that could only be carried out once the stalls had moved, found “poor” ground conditions that resulted in a re-design to carry out the works as planned.

This had also resulted in a further £2.5m being set aside and delay to the start of the work on the new market, the council added.