New homes for Preston village farm plot which council fought to block - but lost

The 40-dwelling redevelopment of part of Swainson Farm, in Goosnargh, was the only one of six applications to create a total of 550 homes in and around the village that was granted permission by a planning inspector last year.

Amongst the five other proposals that were rejected was one for another section of the same agricultural plot, which would have seen a further 87 homes built on the site, off Goosnargh Lane.

Preston City Council refused all six of the planned developments in early 2020, arguing that their “cumulative impact” would have negatively affected the character of a village that would have doubled in size had they all gone ahead.

That led to a three-week public inquiry just over a year later at which the applicants challenged the stance taken by the authority’s planning committee and claimed that Preston was unable to show that it had set aside enough land to meet its minimum new housing target, as required under national planning rules.

However, the inspector, George Baird, dismissed all but one of the appeals when he gave his decision in February last year - with the 40 properties proposed for Swainson Farm being the only application to get through.

The same city council planning committee that originally opposed it has now given the nod to the details of what is now a Duchy Homes scheme, which still needed local approval in spite of the principle of the development having been established by Mr. Baird.

The estate will feature 11 different house types, with detached and semi-detached dwellings ranging between two and five bedrooms in size. They will be laid out along two roads within the site, with a small number of them enjoying access via private driveways.

Two access points off Goosnargh Lane had already been approved as part of the outline permission granted by the inspector. An area of public open space will be incorporated into the finished plot and 35 percent of the homes will fall into the 'affordable' category in order to meet Preston’s planning policy in that regard for rural sites.

In his decision last year, Mr. Baird explained why he had given the go-ahead to building on one part of Swainson Farm, but not the other.

He said that the 40-home estate would replace agricultural buildings whose scale and condition caused them to have “a major negative visual effect on the area”, while the proposed, much smaller properties - in a suitably landscaped setting - would result in “a positive improvement to the village approach”.

The inspector added that he had given “substantial weight” to the provision of market-rate and affordable housing.

In upholding the refusal of the larger proposed development elsewhere on Swainson Farm, Mr. Baird said that its position to the rear of the site meant that it would not have offered the same benefits of enhancing views heading into the village. For that reason, he concluded that the proposal did not outweigh the fact that it conflicted with local planning policies which generally do not support development in areas designated as open countryside.

That categorisation applied to all six of the proposed Goosnargh sites, although they were initially approved by the city council in 2018 when the authority itself believed that it did not have a five-year land supply available. However, a change in that position during a limbo period in which the applications had been ‘called in’ for consideration by the government allowed the council, unusually, to reverse its decision and pull the plug on the permission it had previously granted.

Earlier this year, the planning committee gave the green light to the design details of another farm-based housing estate it had previously refused, when it considered a 151-home development on Cardwell Farm in Barton. The authority had rejected those plans in February 2020, but lost an appeal against that decision 12 months later.