Major road, rail and housing schemes planned for Cumbria now hang in the balance following the collapse of the Moorside nuclear development, it is feared.

This includes Carlisle’s long-awaited southern link road and garden village, the crucial Whitehaven relief road and improvements to the coastal rail route.

Even the Borderlands economic growth plan could potentially be hit.

Cumbria County Council leader Stewart Young fears that funding for these projects may now not come through, and is calling for urgent government intervention.

He said that every major infrastructure bid has used the Moorside nuclear development as part of its case.

But with that deal now in tatters, after Toshiba announced it was pulling out, he is concerned for the future of these schemes.

Mr Young told the News & Star: “The repercussions for the Cumbrian economy are just profound.

“So much of our economic development plans are predicated on the new build happening. All of the arguments that we put to government relate to the billions of private investment coming in.

“This will have the biggest single impact on Cumbria for a very long time. We probably haven’t even realised the full scale, of everything that will be affected.”

He said that although NuGen’s plan was to build a new reactor in west Cumbria, the Moorside development was to benefit the entire county.

Mr Young said ,for example, the Carlisle Southern Link Road, and the closely linked St Cuthbert’s Garden Village plan, could be hit - unless the Government can urgently rescue the deal.

“Part of the argument was that it would improve access to and from west Cumbria, to Moorside. We are now worried as to what the knock on effects of all of this are going to be,” he said.

The same applies to the Whitehaven relief road. “The argument for that was that we are going to have a new reactor here,” he said.

“It’s really very serious. That’s why we are calling on the Government to step in and either take shares, underwrite the losses or do what they did with the one down south (Hinkley Point) and guarantee the strike price.”

Mr Young had hoped rail funding would be confirmed soon, but that has slipped. “We have been trying to get some investment to improve the coastal railway line in Cumbria. But the Toshiba announcement came, and now we have to redo the business case,” he explained.

He said Cumbria needs investment now more than ever.

“Sellafield is now just storing nuclear waste. We’ve got an energy coast that isn’t going to be generating any energy. The NuGen announcement makes it even more important that we get this investment. We need to attract other employers and diversify the economy,” he said.