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14
Aug
Housebuilding firm pledges to start work quickly on 224 Harrogate homes
Durham housebuilding firm Banks Group has welcomed the decision to allow it to build 224 homes in Harrogate and pledged to start work as soon as possible.
The plans, which North Yorkshire Council approved yesterday, will see the homes and a primary school built on a 12.7 hectare site on Whinney Lane in Pannal Ash.
The homes are part of 4,000 planned for west Harrogate and councillors expressed concerns about the impact on local roads.
But its strategic planning committee unanimously backed the scheme, which is on land designated for development under the Harrogate District Local Plan 2014-35.
The Castle Hill West site, which is directly opposite the Castle Hill Farm housing development that Banks Property received planning permission for in 2018 and which was subsequently built by a regional housebuilder, will include 40% affordable housing.
In a media release today, Banks Group said the development will also make “substantial contributions to the expansion and improvement of local secondary education, healthcare and sports facilities, as well as transport infrastructure” through a section 106 agreement signed with the council to compensate for the impact of development on local infrastructire.
The proposed site is marked in red. The section in blue is now the 130-home Stonebridge Homes scheme that has now been developed. Credit - Banks Group
Gillian Reed, senior development manager at the Banks Group, said:
We worked with local community groups for a number of years, we’ve listened and we have provided reassurance about how development will work.
The new government has stressed the importance of increasing the UK’s supply of high-quality homes, both to ensure people have the housing options they need in the places they want to live and to support the wider UK economy’s future growth, and the Castle Hill West site will now be part of meeting both these objectives.
We’re very grateful to all those who have backed our plans and will now look to move them forward as quickly as we can.
Cllr John Mann
4 main traffic areas of concern
Councillor John Mann, a Conservative who represents Oatlands and Pannal, urged the planning committee to reject the scheme.
He said 4,000 homes was an “astonishing” number for west Harrogate to absorb, adding:
This number of new houses equates to the equivalent of a small town, annexed to the side of Harrogate, and is being built in a locality with the very weakest road and transport infrastructure, which comprises a network of narrow country lanes and former cart tracks that link various villages and farms.
The future impact of traffic generated by this large scale development is a particular concern for my constituents. All the communities in the west of Harrogate already experience severe congestion and the environmental and road safety problems caused by high existing volumes of traffic. Effective measures are essential to address this, and mitigate future increases in traffic, especially as so far, only 700 of the scheduled 4000 houses have been built.
The road infrastructure strategy presented with this planning application consists of a number of junction mitigations and minor road widenings along Otley Road and the rat run through country lanes that leads to Burn Bridge and Pannal and on to the A61.
Cllr Mann said if the committee did grant the application, the council should speed up scheduled work in four key areas. He listed these, and made comments on each one, as follows:
- Improvements to the Leeds Road / Follifoot Road traffic lights “as there are huge queues in both directions in the rush-hour”.
- Improvements to the Marks & Spencer‘s junction “as there are capacity issues with this junction resulting in huge tailbacks in the rush-hour”.
- Improvement to the Rossett Green Lane/Green Lane/Leadhall Lane Junction “as the new housing will cause a significant increase in traffic at this junction”.
- Traffic calm and reduce speeds on Hill Top Lane, Hill Foot Lane, Church Lane and the bottom half of Yew Tree Lane leading to Spring Lane.
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