Councillors have given their support to plans for 130 new homes after being told by council officers they would have to defend any appeal themselves if they refused the scheme.
Members of North Yorkshire Council’s Harrogate and Knaresborough area planning committee voted to be minded to approve plans for up to 130 new homes on the edge of Boroughbridge.
The mayor of Boroughbridge, Councillor Zoe Metcalfe, spoke at the meeting against the application for land off Chapel Hill.
She pointed out that Yorkshire Water had submitted an objection because the existing sewer network lacked the capacity for more housing, adding:
“This can be evidenced through residents’ experiences of sewerage surfacing in residential gardens in Boroughbridge on a regular basis because the network cannot cope.”
The mayor also criticised the planning officer’s recommendation to approve the scheme, arguing it relied too heavily on conditions and future reserved matters rather than demonstrating the scheme was acceptable in its current form.
Councillor Robert Windass, who represents the Boroughbridge and Claro division, also highlighted existing issues with the sewage system in the town.
He added:
“The site was never in the local plan. It is a speculative development yet again. Boroughbridge has been absolutely hammered and hammered and hammered again with housing all around it.
“If you get down the center, it is just about strangled with traffic. The place is coming to a standstill almost. So if that is not overdevelopment of the housing around the town, I don’t know what is.”
Cllr Windass proposed that the application be refused.
In response, Nick Turpin, the council’s development service manager for the south area, said the committee would need to make sure any reasons for refusing the application were “defendable” by the authority, while deferring the application could also lead to an appeal on the ground of non-determination by the applicant.
He said the authority had recently tried to defend a similar case where an application had not been approved due to concerns over sewage.
He added:
“Not only did we fail miserably, we were heavily criticised for the approach that the council had taken.”
He said council officers would not want to fight an appeal for the Boroughbridge application.
He said:
“We’d hand it back to you members as decision makers and we’d let you sit in front of an inspector and try and make that case.
“I can’t put it any stronger than that. I don’t think I’m going to find a colleague who’s going to want to try and defend that — not on the basis of the situation that we’re putting to you today.”
The meeting heard that conditions could be placed on the application to ensure that improvements were made to the sewage system before work started on the housing.
Councillors were also told that Yorkshire Water had a statutory duty to provide the required capacity for any new housing.
Rather than supporting the proposal to refuse the applications, councillors voted in favour of being minded to approve the scheme subject to various conditions being agreed by the applicant.
Three councillors voted for the proposal with three against, but it was passed on the chair’s casting vote.
The development will include 40 per cent affordable housing, equivalent to 52 properties.
A section 106 legal agreement will require the developer to provide almost £840,000 towards education provision, including primary school places, SEND provision and early years education.
A further £408,000 will be secured for open space, sports facilities, allotments, village halls and maintenance of on-site green spaces.
The developer would also contribute £260,000 to improve bus services in the area.
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