Friday, March 29, 2024
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Green belt still tight

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Growing anticipation that a Green Belt review is imminent in the Village area has been quashed by district planners.

An application to build a retirement complex in the Green Belt close to Alvechurch village centre has highlighted the pressure even the hope of a review was causing.

The parish council initially gave support to the idea, proposed by McCarthy & Stone, believing that a review of the Green Belt could soon make the site behind the former vet’s surgery in Birmingham Road available for development.

When the council later decided that it could not support the application, parish chairman Andy Humphries said: “When in March 2014 we looked at this in outline, all of us hoped that Bromsgrove District Council would have at least started the Green Belt review and it feels we have been let down here.”

But now planning officers have warned that it is “premature” to be thinking of land being taken out of the Green Belt until well into the next decade.

In its report on McCarthy & Stone’s application to build 36 retirement apartments, Bromsgrove planning department notes: “Some respondents have referred to the council’s intention to undertake a Green Belt review and the potential for this site to be removed from the Green Belt via this process.

“The proposed Submission Version of the Bromsgrove District Plan . . . states that the council will undertake a Green Belt review to identify additional land for housing and this would be completed prior to 2023.”

It adds: “This review has not yet begun and it is premature to assume that any site may or may not be removed from the Green Belt via this process.”

The report recommends that the planning committee turns down McCarthy & Stone’s application on a number of grounds, but chiefly that it would be inappropriate development in the Green Belt.

It also says: “The apartment block is considered to be an awkward, ungainly building without a sense of coherent composition which represents poor urban design.

“Due to its scale, mass and bulk the proposed development would have a significant negative impact on the character and appearance of the Conservation Area, as well as the setting of the listed buildings in Meadow Lane.”

Bromsgrove’s planning committee was due to discuss the application at its meeting on March 2.

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