'Box-ticking' plan for Preston countryside housing estate rejected in spite of pledges to meet local needs

The proposal would have seen 51 properties spring up on a greenfield plot off Garstang Road in Broughton.

Preston City Council’s planning committee refused permission to develop the site, which sits between two other under-construction developments that were controversially approved following public inquiries.

As part of its application, Hollins Strategic Land LLP had made a series of commitments that it argued would have fulfilled a range of local housing needs.

The firm’s blueprint proposed that 40 percent of the dwellings should fall into the “affordable homes” category - five percent more than the proportion demanded by town hall planners in rural areas of the city - to reflect what the applicant described as the “acute indeed” for such properties.

Ten percent of the estate would have been reserved for the over-55s, with two plots earmarked for buyers wanting to build their own home and an unspecified number of houses being of a suitable size to meet the needs of larger families, particularly those from ethnic minority communities.

However, committee member Jennifer Mein said that if she were being “cynical”, the plans smacked of an attempt to tick “every single box” in order to persuade councillors to approve them.

“I think they realised that it was never going to get through,” Cllr Mein added.

Fellow committee member David Borrow - who is also the authority’s cabinet member for planning and regulation - said that while some other developments in the vicinity had been given the green light on appeal to the Planning Inspectorate, the proposed site appeared an “odd place to build”.

He said that in the context of Preston’s local plan as it was originally envisaged when it was adopted in 2015, “it is quite clear that we wouldn't approve an application [in this location], because it is so far away from the current village [centre]”.

Planning officer Lauren Holden stressed that other housebuilding in the immediate area - 130 properties on the other side of Garstang Road and 97 on land to the rear of the site under consideration - had been permitted only when the city council was unable to show that it had five years’ worth of land set aside to meet its minimum new housing needs, as required under national planning legislation. The authority is now comfortably meeting that test.

A report presented to the committee noted that the currently assessed need for housing for the over-55s in Preston equated to 63 dwellings per year - but that this figure was for the city as a whole and not specific to Broughton.

It also stated that there are currently 72 self-build or custom housing plots with permission in Preston - but just four people registered on a council list as having expressed an interest in that kind of purchase.

Meanwhile, it was highlighted that the applicant’s planning statement did not indicate how properties would be secured specifically for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) households.

Councillors were told that the proposal - although not in greenbelt - failed to accord with a Central Lancashire-wide planning policy to direct growth towards “well-located brownfield sites in Preston and adjacent to key service centres”.

It also fell foul of the Broughton Neighbourhood Development Plan and Preston City Council's local plan, which seeks to restrict development in areas of open countryside to that needed for “appropriate rural uses" or so-called “infilling” of small spaces in already developed areas.