Sharp divide on 10,000 city bypass homes

Building 10,000 new homes on the edge of Hereford is better than the alternatives, a senior figure in local policy has said.

Herefordshire Council has said it expects the western bypass project to the west of the city to “create over 10,000 new homes and over 300 acres of new employment land”, and has committed to spending over £40 million on the first, southern phase alone.

“It far better to concentrate new housing in one place, with the infrastructure already in place, than to just spread those 10,000 around the county,” according to Andrew McRobb, director of countryside charity CPRE Herefordshire.

In other large recent Herefordshire developments such as in Ledbury, by contrast, “there’s no infrastructure, no work for them locally, you can’t even walk or cycle to the shops”, he claimed.

Similarly, creating a new town near Pontrilas in the southwest of the county would also be an alternative to “just building serries ranks of new houses”, he added.

And while CPRE originally opposed the western bypass plan, he personally favoured it.

“I’m always getting stuck in traffic,” he said. “We must be the only city that has tractors and combines driving through it.”

But local transport campaigner Liz Morawiecka said that despite cost of the bypass scheme at potentially over £350 million, “I don’t know where the people in all those houses will work”.

Indeed a long-delayed planning application for 1,200 homes at Three Elms had drawn strong objections from Heineken and Avara, two of the county’s largest employers, over the scheme’s possible impact on water quality, she pointed out.

And if not workers, the prospect of “people retiring here from southeast England” would inevitably put pressure on the county’s already strained care system, she claimed.

On the question of relieving congestion in Hereford, Mrs Morawiecka said much of this is down to local parents on the school run, given most feel the option of cycling to school is unsafe – a problem which could be addressed much more cheaply.

But she did agree with Mr McRobb that the Pontrilas area was ripe for development given its local industry, rail and road links.