Green light for almost 450 more homes in growing part of Preston - but no sign of new school

Preston City Council’s planning committee approved the development on land between William Young Way and Maxy House Road in Cottam. The properties will range from one to four bedrooms in size across a variety of house types.

The Morris Homes scheme forms part of the North West Preston Masterplan area, where around 5,500 dwellings are set to be constructed by the mid-2030s – a target that is more than halfway towards being achieved.

The blueprint for that expansion – adopted back in 2017 – stipulated that land should be set aside for two primary schools on a pair of plots within the new housing zone, which sits south of the M55 and also includes Higher and Lower Bartle and Lightfoot Green.

However, as the Lancashire Post has charted, the education facilities are yet to materialise and their continued absence - as the homes they were meant to serve spring up - has been a growing source of political controversy.

A site for one of the schools was reserved as long ago as November 2020 as part of a 200-dwelling development that was approved off Tabley Lane.

Following the reservation of two hectares of space for the second primary within the 443-home William Young Way estate, the Post asked Lancashire County Council whether there were any plans to begin work on either or both of the establishments.

Although the authority – which is responsible for ensuring there are enough school places in Preston – did not respond directly by the time of publication, the Post understands that there is no immediate prospect of construction and that any future decisions about the facilities will be taken in line with demand.

Under the masterplan, the schools would have intakes of up to two new classes each year. Their locations were chosen "to maximise the potential for walking and cycling".

County Hall does plan to deliver a new 420-place primary school on the former site of Whittingham Hospital – which lies around five miles outside the North West Preston Masterplan area – by September 2027. It has also increased the capacities of some existing primaries in North and West Preston in recent years.

The city council’s planning committee heard that the exact location of the proposed school off William Young Way had shifted from its “indicative” position in the masterplan.

Planning case officer Patrick Marfleet said the earmarked area had been moved to “a more logical” spot in the east of the plot, away from the powerlines that run through the centre of the site. It will be transferred to Lancashire County Council for what is described in planning documents as a “peppercorn” fee - and the authority will have access to it for a period of time to be decided under a yet-to-be-drafted legal agreement.

Morris Homes is also handing over almost six hectares of the 21-hectare site to the city council for a new ‘linear park’ – another piece of infrastructure set out within the masterplan – which will run through multiple development sites in the area.

However, the firm successfully argued that it would not be financially viable for it also to fulfil a local planning policy demand for 30 percent of the properties to fall into the discounted ‘affordable homes’ category. Instead, 10 percent of the dwellings – 44 in total – will be offered at a lower rate, with 70 percent of those being within the most heavily discounted bracket of “social rent”.

Garry Goodwin, Morris Homes’ Group Planning and Design Director, said the company had spent two years developing the estate proposal, shaping it around the outcome of “pre-application discussions” with town hall planners.

“We’ve done this by the book. We started with all of your planning [infrastructure] requirements…and it’s only after the application has been properly measured…that elements have been …balance[d] out,” Mr. Goodwin said.

That balancing process also meant the developer was deemed unable to provide the more than £3m that the county council had requested towards the cost of creating the new primary and secondary school places that it is estimated will be needed as a result of the development.

However, a report by planning officers set that in the context of the separate supply of land for the proposed primary school on the site itself – while Mr. Marfleet noted that the “microcosm” of the North West Masterplan area collectively had “its own infrastructure needs”, unlike developments elsewhere in the city.

He said that while the authority would ideally like to “get everything” that was sought from developers as part of the planning process, it was “just not possible” to do so.

Against that backdrop, he added that the city council would “always prioritise provision of affordable housing wherever possible”.

However, planning committee member Cllr Daniel Guise - while acknowledging the gifting of the school land in the case of the application under consideration - said he believed that “in general in this area...the concerns of residents would be around education [more] than they would about [affordable housing]”.

Last October, after three years of wrestling with the issue, Lancashire County Council agreed to delay until 2031 at the earliest a new secondary school planned for the masterplan zone, after concluding there would be insufficient pupils to sustain it until then.

Meanwhile, Cllr Michael Peak said he had found it “disturbing” to read claims from amongst the 17 public objections to the Morris Homes development that stated the firm had “a history of not fully completing” the roads that run through its sites.

However, Mr. Goodwin said highway completion was often delayed on new developments, because the roads could not be “final surfaced and adopted” by the local authority – in this case Lancashire County Council – until construction traffic had stopped using them.

“But we have people moving in [sooner than that], so they have to have temporary ramps up to [their driveways] and raised manholes with tarmac around them [in the meantime]. We know it doesn’t look the best, but it’s the same for every developer,” said Mr. Goodwin.

He added that Morris Homes - which has delivered an adjoining estate to the one being debated by the committee - had recently been awarded a five-star rating in the Home Builders Federation survey, which is “based on customer feedback”.

ESTATE SHAPE

The new development will be split into eastern and western parcels – with 123 homes built in the latter, to be accessed via a neighbouring newly-developed estate on Buckthorn Drive. The main access for the majority of the properties will come from a new road connecting directly to William Young Way.

The dwellings that will be delivered are:

***22 one-bed apartments;

***18 one-bed town houses;

***53 two-bed semi-detached houses;

***125 three-bed semi-detached houses;

***13 three-bed mews homes;

***59 three-bed detached houses;

***153 four-bed detached houses.