Bembridge-based Captiva Homes has been given the green light to build the largest affordable housing development on the Isle of Wight in a decade, in partnership with Sovereign Network Group. Properties at Acorn Farm, on Horsebridge Hill, are expected to be delivered over the next 3 years, for both Islanders on the Isle of Wight Council’s housing register and key workers. A partnership between Captiva Homes and Sovereign Network Group is behind the plan for 131 houses and 72 flats. A new play park will also be included in the development. 
The proposal had pledged all the flats would be ‘affordable’ and the houses would be sold at market price, but £30million in Government funding now means the entire development will be available for a lower-than-market-value price or socially rented. Members of the Isle of Wight Council’s planning committee approved the plans on Tuesday night. Councillor Chris Quirk called it the sort of development the Island needs. Councillor Andrew Garratt, for Parkhurst and Hunnyhill, said it was regrettable a greenfield site would be used but added the scheme ‘was more than sufficiently adequate’. However, he highlighted concerns about the impact of increased traffic on Horsebridge Hill, calling for the future of the Newport to Cowes route to be considered by the Isle of Wight Council.
200 NEW HOMES TO BE BUILT OFF HORSEBRIDGE HILL OVER THE NEXT 3 YEARS
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How much did Captiva pay off the council for this batch of hutches. More green space gone! Affordable for who, not locals that’s for sure. On the housing register, hmmm, and who jumps to the top of that I wonder, well I will tell you, if your on hard drugs, and say you need a home, you will get one straight away, way ahead of anyone else. Just ask the council.
£30 million in Government funding to build 200 homes = £150,000 per house!!!
They should be giving these houses away because there is no way that they will cost that much to build. And they plan to sell them for even more profit! What a money-making scam. Brown envelopes all round me thinks.
Why doesn’t our lovely council just concrete over the whole of the Island?
They are trying. I’m not swallowing that bs it’ll be for islanders and key workers either. Knowing sovereign it’ll be full of unemployed Northern folk just like most of their properties. Or lots more new locals no other council want!!
85% of the Island is empty!! Plenty of room for many more homes!
More unnesseccary homes being built on this crumbling island.
Doctors dentist’s hospital and schools
Don’t even bother it be blown up we’re Benin WW3 then
Good point, the world plan is to de-populate, they tried with
medical procedures but people are now getting wise to this
so next step is to start WW3
How else will they reach their dream of Net Zero!!
As you would say Old Farts start Wars.
They won’t be affordable to islanders!!!!
More trash from the mainland on their way.
Councillor Andrew Garratt, for Parkhurst and Hunnyhill, said it was regrettable a greenfield site would be used.
not regrettable enough that he is blindly agreeing to more and more people, more and more traffic, more and more pollution, refuse, sewage, the destruction of natural habitats, another field that soaks up rainwater gone, only for the rain water to flood the housing and streets, longer queues at the hospital, even more demand for dentists and for what……more money for the councillors pay rises through council tax, by virtue of more people here.
the council are putting their own financial gains through higher salaries in the future above the environment again.
By “regrettable” he actually meant “shameful”. Shame on this council for letting developers build on greenfield sites. They are a total disgrace.
Silly and inaccurate comment
What about some more doctors and dentists to support these potential new residents as well as new access road to Newport and Cowes
It is unfortunate that it is a greenfield site, however as all properties will be ‘affordable’ and for IOW families and NHS workers, as Chris Quirk said this is ‘the sort of development the Island needs’. Unlike the 56 houses approved on a greenfield site at the same meeting, with over 600+ objections, against the local Neighbourhood Development Plan, area of flooding and sewage being discharged into the sea. Any faith I had in the Planning Officers and IOW Councillors has officially gone.
All properties will be affordable, not for everyone
This is terrible for the island that is already heavily populated.
Excellent! So all the money spent on the new traffic light system at St. Mary’s, to save an extra 7 vehicles queueing at the roundabout, was money well spent! They’re just about to add about 400 cars to the melee.
Yes it was, it caused huge tailbacks in case you’d forgotten already!
Oh goody another socially engineered pan estate – less money for rent means much more for drugs and booze and a ready market for county lines ‘holidaymakers’,
They will only fill them up with nerdowells from the mainland and migrants.
The council don’t listen to its communities as is obvious after they approved the Bembridge application even though it had 600 objections. Yet again this is another greenfield site. The council state they would be looking to avoid greenfield developments and prefer brownfield. Yet I have not seen many brownfield applications, plenty on greenfield though! It is all lip service! The council are corrupt and are taking obvious backhand payments for these developments! 80% of market value is not affordable for many on the island. Personally, I was born on this Island but now I feel this island has nothing to offer me and I am looking to leave as soon as I can and sell my house. I’m still only young and have a degree so I have options many don’t.
Spot on,ive told my two children there is nothing for them here now,they need to get off the island and emigrate,and not to the mainland as that is already dead.
Totally agree, told my kids the same.
I grew up here and worked here most of my life, apart from my time in the army. It’s one of the most beautiful places anywhere, however over the past 40 years it has been sadly ruined by successive council’s who don’t care about the local population. Can you imagine Jersey or Guernsey being treated the way the island has?
Good bye!!
Captiva homes again, is there no end to their greed? They need to directly FUND dentists and doctors with building medical centres and paying staff salaries. Southern Water need to sort out the sewage treatment and build new reservoirs, and there should be limitations on the amount of traffic on Island roads. There also needs to be limitations on 2nd home owners etc etc etc. It’s about time the Council had a Public Meeting over residents concerns.
Don’t be fooled by the “affordable” homes bit – they won’t be. All that will happen will be that mainland councils will buy up a large majority of them and move their problem tenants in for us to foot all the corresponding financial costs incurred via our Council Tax. Perhaps this would be a good time to build a bridge over the Medina to help curb the extra inevitable traffic chaos that will ensue.
of couse not its all bollocks..and fucking lies..
No mainland council has ever bought homes on the Island to put ‘mainland’ people in.
They don’t, it’s the housing associations that do it, council subcontracted housing out in the late 80s.
How do I know? We all lost our jobs because of it
Chiz, were you employed by IW Council housing team or one of the housing associations?
Sorry Mark, I thought it was a council thing but I stand corrected by Chiz. A friend if mine who was a taxi driver in Newport told me a few years ago that on the estate by Sainsburys several of the offshoot closes were populated fully by people who had been housed from London areas and several families were extremely feral.
You can build these rabbit hutches ,you can call them affordable for key workers!!!!! Etc etc….
But where are you going to get these key workers from ?????
Drs Nurses Dentists etc !!!!!!!
Unfortunately you cannot build these ……
And to be honest, who from the mainland would want to move to the concrete jungle …..
Not exactly an inviting option……
Great no doctors no dentist no water no drainage infrastruction,more traffic roads unfit, more crashes more delays at that point more lights more scum more filth….do i need to say any more???
You can just see the amount of car crashes to come someone got payed off,has to be the worse place to put a new estate already takes a massive amount of time to get into and out of newport in the mornings and afternoon…going to be a disaster for months to come..well done to the corrupt useless council..
Yep good half hour just because of one poxy roadworks!
Imagine over 200+ more cars trying to join the st mary’s fairy lights queue!!!!!
I lived on the prison estate back in the 70’s and 80’s , the area they are going to build on is a Bog or Marsh land however you wish to describe it . Even in the hot summer of 1976 us kids would be up to our knees in mud , so if you wish to buy or are offered a house/ ground flat get one at the top of the field cause sure enough give it a year and you’ll slide down to the bottom
So right, there was a stream that ran through, land all around had marsh reeds etc.
Yeah the stream was at the bottom of Rooke Street, ran right through to the main road, and they wonder why when it rains, it always floods at the bottom of Horsebridge hill
‘Affordable’ is code for yob estate. It’s nowhere near me thank God..
Obviously this will include a new, fully staffed, GP Surgery to cater for the additional population. What idiots allowed this ?
I am sorry to read the negative comments about people who live in social housing. I grew up in a council house. Mum and Dad worked hard to look after our family. I got a great education and went to university. In our neighbourhood the vast majority of people also worked hard; some of their kids went to university, others learned trades. There was a good sense of community with people looking out for each other.
It is regrettable this green field site is lost to development. Yes, there are issues – not least the traffic growth along the whole route – and I’ll continue pressing the council on these. But, for me and on balance, having somewhere that helps Island families in the way getting a council house helped us in the past is welcome.
that doesn’t justify building benefit hutches on greenfields, destroying the environment, creating more waste, more pollution and more people on an already overcrowded island whose infrastructure cannot cope.
if you had even a modicum of intelligence, you would be saying “we will be refusing to accept any benefit funded moves to the island, we will not be accepting or paying for any dinghy people that have arrived from france. We will be requiring all airbnb to cease, we will only permit the purchase of property on the island for primary residence, not 2nd homes and we will not permit any houses to be built anywhere until such times as our roads, drains, sewage system, doctors and dentists can cope with all demands.”
How can you justify giving £30 million of government money (£150,000 per home) to Captiva and then let them sell the properties for a vast profit? Building the homes will cost nowhere near that amount and they haven’t specified what they will sell them for. This should be explicitly stated and a contractual obligation. This council seem to be utterly clueless and the whole deal stinks.
The social housing providers on the IW need to explain why when the Housing acts say they provide houses for people only from Hampshire & IW they think that applies to anyone who turns up here or is born to non Hampshire & IW residents. A survey of how many existing social houses are occupied by non compliant people would be interesting. They wont do one as I suspect 30% of people need moving out.
There is no Housing Act that says people have to be housed from Hampshire or the Isle of Wight for the Housing register for Social Housing.. The Island has a local lettings policy, where you have to prove you are from the Island, have lived here for a minimum of 5 years, or have close relatives already living here, and that only works at a stretch. Define non compliant? Housing Association regularly do tenancy audits, and know who live in their properties.
May as well call it the Bibby Stockholme estate.
Key workers covers nearly everything nowadays.
How is Coppins Bridge going to cope with all the extra cars from this estate? Where are all the jobs for the owners? How are public services such as doctors, dentists and hospitals going to cope? All the council is interested in is all the extra council tax they will raise plus all the additional income from car parks.
Plus all the extra carbon they will produce plus the carbon produced importing the food which could have been grown on that land
Can the council tell me one thing how this proposal will benefit anybody on the island
So, the government handed over £30mil of tax payers money they dont have, so a private developer can sell a few houses below market value and still profit, while selling the rest at market value to earn an aditional tidy profit, putting more strain on local services. But fear not! we are getting a play park too!? im sure the road network, doctors and dentists are relieved this important supporting infrastructure has been provided as part of the deal.
They had to get the deal through fast because the government’s guidelines on the requirements for councils to grant permission to build certain amounts of new houses are changing. The council is no longer required to give permission to build a quota of houses because of the “special situation” of the island. Basically, the island’s population is contracting in contrast to the growth throughout the rest of the country. So there is no need for new houses here and the only benefit is for property developers and their associates on the council.
What happened to building all the new homes at Hmp Camphill? So confident we’re the council they put in that silly new roundabout.. But wait HMP had already told the Council before roundabout delusion that it was not for sale and they would not be forced to sell.. So wait in steps Captiva we willbe the heroes and build on GREENFIELD SITE and by the end if it no real Social housing will emerge just second homes so no need to worry about SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS, DENTIST, GP’S what a corrupt parasitic council we have… Which one has a famy member on Captiva then?.
With the amount of houses captivia build they will get good discounts on materials so workout a rough estimate give or take to build these huts. 1 bed 40k 2 bed 60k 3 bed 80k 4 bed 120k would be nice to know the actual price.
Increase those costs by 50% on each one and you’re about right
Walking from West Cowes to Newport as the traffic will be at standstill even more in the summer, New road layout to ease congestion a little while back now it will be back to square one.potentialy another four hundred cars in the future as most households have at least two cars in a family. well done the council not.
All new houses should go to island people in need of homes not for familys being brought over by housing associations, any island family’s that is temporary or emergency housing should be the ones that are housed first.Island homes for Island people only. Where are the kids going to school School runs that will stop the traffic everywhere.