YORK City managing director Jason McGill has revealed that the club will be submitting, jointly with Persimmon Homes, a second planning application for the redevelopment of Bootham Crescent.

The club do not intend to move into a new stadium for ten years but McGill pointed out that the planning application would provided the surety required by the Football Stadia Investment Fund, who issued the club with a £2million loan to buy back their ground.

A successful planning application could also provide the club with proven equity should money be needed for any possible future crisis.

McGill said: "We will have a joint planning application for Persimmon Homes for the redevelopment of Bootham Crescent and the reason we are doing that is it gives us a value to the land and it secures the loan with the Football Foundation. When we have planning permission it means the ground will be worth £4.5million and guarantees the Foundation's money if anything happens to the football club.

"It also gives us a significant amount of equity, let's call it a war chest, which, if we want to use it in a time of crisis, can be used, for example, to bring in two or three players which we were unable to do this season. Bristol Rovers did do, tanked us 3-0 and stayed up.

"We needed that but, because the money that we were promised by John Batchelor did not come through, we were prevented from doing that."

Updated: 10:41 Saturday, June 12, 2004