Up to 60 homes approved in Woodbury

Up to 60 more homes are set to be built in an east Devon village where more than 130 have been approved for construction in the past year.

Developer 3West has secured permission to build the homes on land south of Gilbrook House in Woodbury, including some affordable housing.

The scheme is an outline planning application at this stage, meaning the exact number of homes and precise detail of their design will be dealt with in a subsequent application.

The approval of the scheme comes after up to 63 homes across two sites off Globe Hill were approved in Woodbury in September, and a previous scheme on farmland on the southern edge of the village given the go-ahead for up to 70 homes in November last year.

Although the parish council lodged objections to the latest plan, East Devon District Council’s planning committee voted seven to one in favour of the scheme, with four councillors abstaining.

The Gilbrook House site is currently outside the area where development is permitted in Woodbury.

However, East Devon’s emerging local plan, which identifies which sites in the district are suitable for housing and employment developments, had identified the location as one that would be suitable for new homes.

While the new local plan is not yet in effect, planners acknowledged that the district needed to make sure it approved enough schemes to ensure it had a five-year housing land supply, a metric by which local councils are assessed by central government.

Much of the opposition to the scheme centred on the perceived lack of safety of the pedestrian route to and from the site over the bridge in Gilbrook.

However, Devon’s highways department felt the pedestrian route was acceptable given it would be an improvement on the existing situation on that road, whereby only a white line separates cars from pedestrians.

Furthermore, a new pedestrian access connecting the development to Gilbrook Close is being proposed as part of the scheme, meaning anyone walking from the site can access Woodbury’s centre via another route.

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