Chorley village estate expansion approved

Dozens of new homes are to be built in a Chorley village amid concern over the lack of services for the people who will eventually move into them.

Chorley Council’s planning committee approved a bid to build 57 new properties as part of the second phase of a development off Charter Lane in Charnock Richard.

They will now be added to the 76 dwellings built elsewhere on the plot over the past three years – creating an estate made up entirely of discounted ‘affordable homes’.

However, the meeting at which the decision was made heard from locals who claimed the village could not absorb the pressure that the expansion of the site would bring.

Colette Jolly, from the Charnock Richard Residents’ Association, said the latest phase of the Westchurch Homes scheme was “fundamentally unsustainable for this location” – and would have “severe and unacceptable impacts on highway safety and the environment”.

She added:  “We’re not saying don’t build anything, but the scale of this proposal far exceeds what the village can easily support.    There’s no shop, no doctor, no secondary school and barely any services within walking defiance – forcing residents to rely on a car by necessity, not choice.”

As part of the permission granted, the developer has had to commit to making a £40,000-per-year contribution to the cost of a bus service for the area a three-year period.  However, objectors questioned what would happen after that money ran out.

Committee members had deferred their decision on the plans back in December, so that they could pay a visit to the site before reaching a conclusion.

During the reconvened debate, they were reminded by the authority’s head of planning, Kevin Foster, that the land had been allocated for housing within the new Central Lancashire Local Plan.  Although that policy – which will direct development in Chorley, South Ribble and Preston until the early 2040s – is yet to come into force, it is expected to be adopted later this year, meaning that it carried significant weight, councillors were told.

Charnock Richard parish councillor Janet Bowen said villagers could “testify” to the fact that the area around the first phase of the development had regularly flooded since that initial tranche of properties had been built.

”The water attenuation system installed to serve the development is clearly inadequate and cannot support the current phase 1 – it will therefore fail considerably if it is to support phase 2 as well,” she warned.

However, the agent for the application, Sarah Jones, said surrounding roads and the village football ground had flooded in the past – and so “the relationship [of the problem] to the recent development is questioned”. She added that members who visited the site would have seen the “high quality of the dwellings” already built.

Lancashire County Council – in its capacity both as lead local flood authority and highways authority – also deemed the plans for the second phase acceptable.

Committee member Cllr Alan Whittaker echoed concerns over the dearth of amenities and said it was “not NIMBY syndrome” to be alarmed about what would amount to a “15 [or] 16 percent increase in the number of households in Charnock Richard” as a result of the total 133-home estate.

However, his committee colleague, Cllr Alex Hilton – while similarly concerned – said that further development would likely bring with it some of the currently missing local services.

Cllr Craige Southern added that while he believed the proposal was “the wrong development in the wrong place…and out of scale”, he was certain that if the committee refused the application and the developer appealed to the Planning inspectorate, “we’ll lose”.

He also said he did not want to risk, in that scenario, some of the conditions attached to the permission to help “mitigate” its effects – such a lower proposed housing density – being surrendered.

The application was ultimately approved by six votes to two.

The estate’s second phase will feature 12 one-bed, 12 two-bed, 21 three-bed and 12 four-bed properties.