The application for 34 houses at Restrop Road has been refused for the following reasons: the proposed development was “in the countryside” outside the framework; it was premature and was trying to jump in quickly before the Wiltshire Core Strategy (which will steer future housing locations) has been approved; and it is not required to meet the five-year housing land supply.
In fact, the same reasons for which Widham was refused.
There were also some technical issues, namely, that drainage was not adequately dealt with, lack of consideration for the badgers there, absence of a detailed parking plan, lack of archeological evaluation and not enough affordable housing.
All this is fairly obvious and one of the disappointing things is that these people go to the trouble of holding an exhibition but then bat away all the reasonable local comments that are shared at those events. One such instance was the lack of bungalows in the design. Bungalows are needed in the parish as evidenced by Transforming Purton Parish Foresight & Resilience 2013. The developers simply countered that these were not economical feasible. Well, until developers begin to realise that when they come to use the land of the parish that they must be prepared to build communities and not just houses, they should expect to be disappointed.
