Publication Draft

Object

Representation ID: 66026

Received: 27/06/2014

Respondent: Barratt Homes

Agent: Savills

Legally compliant? Not specified

Sound? No

Duty to co-operate? Not specified

Whilst the approach chosen by Warwick District Council to allocating development by disbursing housing growth across the district is considered justified. The process of apportioning housing allocations to the villages in the Green Belt is not considered justified given the lack of a robust evidence base.

The identification of Hampton Magna as the highest scoring village in the District in the Settlement Hierarchy Report (Draft) is considered to be justified on account of the range of services and facilities within the village, the proximity of the village to Warwick and the connectivity of the village to good local, regional and national public transport links.

Currently the growth of some of the District's villages, such as Hampton Magna, are constrained by the location of these villages in the Green Belt.

The apportionment of housing between the villages, as listed in the Local Plan Publication Draft consultation document at Policy DS11, is not considered to either represent the most appropriate strategy or be justified by a robust evidence base or achieve the spirit of NPPF paragraph 109 with respect to the protection and enhancement of the most valued landscapes.

With respect to housing numbers, there does not appear to be a consistent and transparent approach taken to deriving the apportionment of housing numbers to the villages. it is certainly not clear whether the 100 dwelling housing allocation for Hampton Magna shown in policy DS11 has been robustly derived.

Barratt Homes queries why WDC has chosen to restrict the housing apportionment for Hampton Magna to 100 dwellings. The evidence base calculations do not appear to justify this restriction.

The rejection of land west of Stanks Farm, based purely on the connectivity of the site with the settlement is not considered justified. Whilst the land west of Stanks Farm is not as directly accessible to the majority of key facilities as the proposed site, there is not a significant difference in accessibility and indeed the land west of Stanks Farm achieves better accessibility to public transport than is achieved by the proposed allocation site (H27).

Notwithstanding this, the evidence base does not even test the potential for the land west of Stanks Farm to be developed in addition to another site at Hampton Magna (eg H27) in order for the full development potential of the very sustainable Hampton Magna to be optimised, realised and expanded beyond the dwelling capacity constraint of 100 dwellings imposed on Hampton Magna by the single proposed allocation H27.There is no justification for the restriction to 100 dwellings and we therefore consider
this level of housing to be arbitrary.

The Green Belt allocations, particularly around Hampton Magna should accordingly be reviewed, for the Local Plan to be found 'sound'.