Braddan Commissioners are asking the government to sign off a £6.5 million loan to build a leisure facility in the parish.

A petition has been submitted to the Department of Infrastructure seeking the funds.

Plans for the site include using it as a sports hall, child nursery, and commissioners’ offices.

Should the loan application be approved, the sum would be paid back over a 30-year period.

The vice chair of the commissioners, Christina Corkill, said: ’The Department of Infrastructure will be responsible for to an extent for allowing the build, but we also always need to go to (the) Treasury to ensure that it’s a viable project, especially when it’s got a price tag of £6.5 million.’

She added: ’Loans [interest rates] are very low at the moment, government is looking for big projects that will help the economy, produce jobs, and this community centre will do exactly that.’

Asked how restricting the government loan would be for Braddan’s budget, she said: ’This project has been ongoing in the planning stage for a long time, simply because we’d been going over the figures again and again, we wanted to be absolutely sure that we weren’t going to end up with a white elephant, we were going to end up with something that people really wanted and that would benefit the community immediately.

’It made absolute sense to do this project now and create better infrastructure and create new jobs.’