Keepmoat eyes up Derby ‘green wedge’ residential scheme

Plans for up to 200 homes on farmland between Spondon and Chaddesden look set to reignite debate over Derby’s network of protected spaces, and set up a fresh test of how far planning policy can bend in the face of the city’s housing shortage.

Housebuilder Keepmoat lodged proposals for a parcel of former farmland separating the two villages at the end of February.

The 17-acre site off Acorn Way, around three miles east of Derby city centre, sits in a so-called “green wedge” site – one of several areas of land intended to prevent urban sprawl in the city.

Derby’s green wedges, a network of 13 locally-defined protected green spaces designated in the council’s local plan, are intended to separate neighbourhoods, and maintain visual and physical links with the countryside.

A report prepared for the city council in September last year said the wedges were “highly effective” in shaping the urban structure of the city, and recommended that they were retained as part of the authority’s emerging local plan.

But the city council’s planning department, which refused permission for 250 homes on the site in 2014, and again for a smaller scheme on a nearby plot in 2025, will have to contend with a tilted balance as it weighs up the merits of the latest green wedge proposals.

The authority is currently only able to demonstrate a 2.7 year supply of land for housing, which amounts to a shortfall of around 2,500 houses across the current five year period.

A planning statement submitted in support of the application also drawing attention to a “persistent undersupply” of affordable housing, with around 30% of the scheme is proposed to be affordable housing – up to 60 houses.

In its submission, Keepmoat says a “blanket restriction” on new development in green wedge sites should be relaxed when the tilted balance applies, arguing that the sites are a “local designation, with no national status”.

“The need for new housing across Derby as a whole is significant and should be afforded very significant weight in the determination of the application,” said the statement.

“The proposed development will deliver up to 200no. dwellinghouses, and at a time when the council continues to be unable to demonstrate a 5-year housing land supply – currently stated to be 2.7 years (and that without further investigation of its claimed sources of supply).”

The scheme will be decided in due course.

The project team for the development includes ID Partnership Northern as architects and Masterplanners, Brindle & Green, Nineteen 47, Dragonfly Consulting, TPM Landscape Architects and JPP.

Plans and documents relating to the application can be found on Derby City Council’s planning portal, using reference: 26/00255/OUT