Mepal Parish Council heard tonight from property consultants Plansurv and not-for-profit housing provider Havebury about their interest in developing land at Brick Lane Mepal for around 55 affordable homes.
No planning application has yet been submitted, and is unlikely to be before the autumn. However, there were already a number of questions from residents, in particular:
- Can the access be from Witcham Road rather than along Brick Lane, perhaps with traffic lights to control traffic?
- Why has the design changed so that instead of the green space being in the centre for children to play, it’s now dispersed around the outside of the site?
- Will there be funding for local schools from the development?
- What will the parking provision be like?
- Why is it proposed to remove the hedging along Brick Lane and replace it with alternative planting?
- How long will the construction period be, and how will the site be managed to minimise disruption?
The Brick Lane site was in the council’s emerging local plan as a site for 50 homes. However, the council abandoned its own plan earlier this year. This means the plan currently in force is the old 2015 local plan, which doesn’t allocate Brick Lane for development, and which draws the development envelope around the village to exclude it.
This means any proposal for housing here will come to the council as a departure from the local plan, and will need some very convincing reasons if it is to go ahead.
How about we stop using farm land for building and use it for what in was intended GROWING FOOD.
If the agricultural land is of good quality, I agree. The analysis of the Brick Lane land at the time of the (now withdrawn) was ‘all or part of site intersected by ALC3 or lower’, which to be honest isn’t very informative! It doesn’t say how much of the land is of Grade 3 or lower quality.