No to 70-home rural estate near Herefordshire village

A bid to create a 70-home estate at a Herefordshire village has been refused, for a slew of reasons.

The Whitfield Estate and local developer Bell Homes submitted the plan for land in Wormbridge in 2019. It would have also meant expanding the business centre within the 6.3-hectare site, which straddles the A465 Hereford-Abergavenny road.

“The Clive family of the Whitfield Estate have been involved in Wormbridge for many generations and the purpose of the scheme is to contribute to a sustainable future for the village and its economy,” the estate’s website said.

The homes would have a been a mix of styles, formats and tenures, with 12 being available for affordable sale and a further 12 for rent at reduced rates.

The estate planned to share ownership of the social rented housing with the Addington Fund, an agricultural benevolent charity.

The homes would have been heated by air-source heat pumps and would have been equipped with high-speed broadband.

The existing listed farmhouse on the opposite side of the road to the housing would have been converted to incorporate a café and bed-and-breakfast, while an existing day nursery would move to a new premises across the road.

The estate held a public consultation locally two months ago, at which it presented opportunities to enhance the scheme, including more greening measures.

But this appears to have been of no avail, as Herefordshire Council this week issued a list of reasons why the proposal could not go ahead.

It “would result in a satellite housing estate of substantial scale isolated from amenities and services, failing to deliver proportionate, sensitive and sustainable housing growth”, the council’s development manager said.

The scheme “failed to adequately cater for the specific needs of the elderly population”, or to provide “a safe, inclusive, accessible and well-integrated network of public open space”, and would “unacceptably intrude into open countryside… and be out of keeping with the established dispersed settlement pattern”.

Despite the use of acoustic barrier fencing, traffic noise from the A465 would make living conditions “unacceptable”, nor did the design “deliver an appropriate highway safety outcome”.

Adequate measures to address the risk of flooding had not been supplied. The new childcare centre would not have been safely accessible from the proposed housing. And the new employment space would have been “on greenfield land in a rural car-dependent location”.

Lastly, the provision of affordable housing was below the 40 per cent required by county policy, while the application lacked a “section 106” agreement undertaking to provide or fund wider infrastructure improvements.

Kilpeck Parish Council backed the plan, and there were four submissions of support from individuals, and four against.