Cllr Guida Esteves commented on our Facebook page on 8 November:
I was heartened by the Inspector’s recent dismissal of the appeal for 28 dwellings to be built on land behind 5 Send Barns Lane in Send.
These are not the right homes in the right place. This is not an allocated site in the Local Plan, there is no identified need for these homes in Send and as the inspector points out “the Council has confirmed that it can demonstrate a five year supply of deliverable housing sites, and the recently updated figure confirms a 7.34 year supply”. There were many reasons given for the dismissal , including poor design inconsistent with the semi-rural nature of the village.
Some points stood out which could easily apply to many of the applications for new houses in Send since April 2019 when our village was inset from the Greenbelt.
- The site is bounded by the rear gardens of residential properties […] as well as undeveloped open countryside, reflecting the prevailing semi-rural nature of the area. - A loose-knit urban grain exists within the village, with a variety of dwelling types and a prevalence of soft landscaping within plots, reflecting the proximity of the built development to open countryside. - The indicative layout plan proposes to introduce an urbanising form of development onto the site, which would be strongly at odds with the semi-rural character of the area. - The proposed straight, dense and regular arrangement of the majority of the new dwellings within a long L-shaped access road would be out of keeping with the more informal, loose-knit, spacious layout of built development which prevails within the locality. - The amount of building footprint of the proposed dwellings and the significant amount of space taken up by the access road, parking and turning areas, means that built development would dominate the scheme, to the detriment of the semi-rural character of the area. - Tandem parking to the side of a number of the dwellings would result in built development extending across the full width of a number of the plots. This would be incongruous within the surrounding more spacious ad-hoc layout of built development, where dwellings are set in spacious and soft-landscaped plots, so that built development sits comfortably within a semi-rural environment without being visually dominant. - Whilst some new tree planting is shown adjacent to the road entrance, the narrow width of the remainder of the road and its lack of pavements would restrict the ability of the scheme to provide a tree-lined new street, as required by the framework.