Years after it was first proposed, permission to start a major Isle of Wight housing development has finally been granted.
The West Acre Park development on the edge of Ryde can now go ahead after 1 of the last formalities was granted.
It means those opposing the development, Save Westridge Farm, can now officially launch a legal challenge and hopes to raise thousand more pounds to do so.
While the decision was made in April to let the development happen, the Isle of Wight Council’s planning officers needed to finalise legal agreements before the authority could officially issue the planning permission, which it did earlier this month.
Now for developers, Captiva Homes, the clock is ticking and it has within 3 years to start the scheme or permission will expire.
Before spades can get in the ground, there are final conditions and details that would need to be approved by the Council including construction access, public footpaths and mitigation and enhancement plans, as well as the development phases.
Overall, there are 32 conditions Captiva Homes must comply with throughout the course of the development to ensure it is delivered in a way the Council approves.
There have been many twists in the saga of West Acre Park since it was first unveiled in July 2020, on the then working dairy farm, Westridge Farm.
Permission was first granted for the scheme in 2021 but an issue raised by Natural England about a protected habitat for curlews saw the matter back before the Council’s planning committee earlier this year, where it was again approved.
Campaign group against the development, Save Westridge Farm, confirmed on its website it was still seeking a judicial review as it believes the Council made ‘errors’ in the planning process and says it could not allow the authority to ‘get away with a huge miscarriage of justice’.
The group has had to wait for planning permission to be officially issued before it can request a judicial review and has had lawyers preparing a case to be raised at the High Court.
Now consent has been granted, the campaigners need to achieve a fundraising goal to launch the review.
It says it needs to add another £14,000 to its cash fund in 31 days to take the review forward, having already raised more than £25,000 since it was started in September 2021.
Captiva Homes has been contacted for comment.
I hope everyone now gets behind the Save Westridge Farm Campaign on the Crowd funding website.
This is our real, and last chance to stand up to this corrupt IWC Planning dept, and teach them they can not go on with their illegal and dirty practices, with absolutely no regard for us the residents, the environment and wildlife.
We PAY our council to look after OUR best welfare, education, safety and quality of life here on the Island.
We ought not NEED pressure groups to ‘fight’ the cause.
These useless at best, perhaps corrupt, Councillors should be saying NO, no matter what HMG dictate, UNTIL more doctors are provided, until schools have capacity, until roads are made safer and fully repaired, and should insist that sewage, and water run off is certain not to cause more issues for the residents ALREADY HERE , who are paying the councils wages for an ever worsening service.
With the thousands of extra home here, c.tax should be either less, OR we ought to have a better service, SO, WHERE does all the money go? On nere do wells and salaries imo
I really do hope that everyone on the Island get behind the campaign to save Westridge farm so that this judicial review can go ahead. This planning committee need to be shown that they cannot just bulldoze their way through our beautiful countryside. This is a time when people power really must take a stand for justice and be listened to.
Where do you suppose all the homes are to house the never ending flotilla of craft, let alone the lorries, cars, planes etc with illegals stowed inside?
Do you people never see the ‘coincidence’ that since massive migration to the UK by the worlds impoverished that more building is happening despite a fall in UK birth rates?
Are you all so stupid you just see mostly UK people in these new estates and don’t ‘link’ the newcomers to such?
Many many people now come to live on the Island as they no longer feel safe or at home in areas they have lived all their lives on the mainland, thus we are building over our Island to house those people now escaping the stream of never ending illegals here.
Send the illegals back to France as soon as the boats get near to UK waters. People would not have to escape from the mainland to the island and we would not have to build more houses for them.
You could under the EU, but because numbnuts like you voted to leave, we can’t.
mark no you couldn’t and none were ever returned- they are in the process of mandating quotas across the eu to force states to take illegals – the UK would have been forced to take a sizeable share.
The truest comment on here
How dare they build homes here, the should be built somewhere on the mainland. We have too many homes here, we need to start demolishing homes!
We need to have LESS arrivals into the UK.
For they aren’t all in hotels, and those who are, won’t be forever, so millions of extra houses will be built to house them, and many locals in those areas flee to places like here to escape such. Thus causing more building to house the displaced here.
So atm indirectly and likely soon directly, these illegal invaders are ruining our countryside, adding to traffic, landfill, sewage, energy usage, schools doctors, dentist, and the cost of such, as all arrive with nothing will have to be met by us, but the countryside and quality of life for us who fund these unwanted is gone, forever.
We have a duty to look after our own people, but not the entire planets chancers.
I take it then you will be the first to offer up your home for demolition so that your land can be given back to nature…
And the ever increasing Island population will live where? Or should we force the younger generations off the Island which will kill the future of the Island.
The IWC have signed this unwanted and unnecessary development in the full knowledge that Ryde will be loosing one of it’s three Doctors Surgeries.
As has now become clear the “promised” new doctors surgery that Captiva is to build is for Esplanade surgery, all supposing it ever gets built!!
Make no mistake, in granting this permission, no thought or provision has been made for the housing needs of IW residents.
The whole matter from beginning to end stinks of corruption, peppered with lies, lies, and more lies.
Why do the Council NEVER listen to the people who live here?
We don’t need all these new homes building, there’s only a ‘housing crisis’ because the Council keeps bringing people from the mainland and housing them here.
Perhaps our local Press should be asking the question ‘How many people are rehoused on the Island from the mainland or elsewhere every year?’
Well they found homes for 252 people from Ukraine without any trouble and have just ‘won’ another £2.2 million from a taxpayer pot to acquire more homes solely for these people, so I think it’s a question they won’t want to answer too openly – it’s good for chattering class virtue signaling though
It was always going to happen, we know that. Too many Brown Envelopes would have been lost if it hadn’t been passed!
All that extra sewage going into the sea, the cars on our roads, the extra people moving here wanting a much needed Doctor and Dentist and poor St Marys Hospital….all these services and the infrastructure cannot cope now…….and what do this council do, pass a major building development. Unbelievable. I hope many are sensibly priced!!!!
something about destroying the environment, cramming in a load of rubbish rabbit hutches, selling them for ridiculous prices, and running away with millions in profits will building no additional infrastructure seems deeply immoral to me, yet the council lets them get away with it, at this point the council may as well be the local government arm of the housing developers, as every time they seem to do what’s best for the developers, can’t remember the last time I saw a development rejected, really does make you think what’s behind this…
what really needs to happen is direct action – name the developers, name the individuals in the planning dept who approved it, then lobby them personally, about their poor decision making
A forgone, what with the developers being well versed in odd handshakes.
Yet of all those who complain rightly about the development and ruination of our countryside, still choose not to see the real REASON why so many homes have to be built here.
Just because we have thankfully lower numbers of newcomers living here, the massive daily influx of such, then force local indigenous people to up sticks and leave areas that they no longer feel at home, safe or part of anymore.
And low newcomer density areas like the Island then become building sites to house those people, usually older retired people.
So HMG needs to end and return the flotsam otherwise the destruction will continue forever.
Africa can keep supplying forever
Planners ,what have you done ? There’s already too many people here, and with services diminishing in many sectors, Doctors, dentists, hospital treatment and police still invisible, well I haven’t seen one walking in my area.
And where are these people going to find work ? Maybe it will become benefit city. Of course we need housing for locals and professionals working here. BUT NOT ON THIS SCALE.
£14,000 now required amongst a population of 140,000 plus. Hardly impossible, and a terrific opportunity for IW residents to stand up to this vile Council, and be heard.
Why are the council not building these house to clear the housing backlog? Yet more unaffordable housing no doubt. While I agree more houses need to be built, the way developers are doing this is wrong. We need the houses but not by money grabbing developers. Anyway, with the housing market looking as procarius as it is, I don’t believe there will be enough money in making something like this now or the next 3 years.
it’s about time i have been looking for a holiday homes on that island they need to build nr brook so there nearer to the beech better weekly return
Fill it with migrants, dilute the gene pool! Happy Days!
Housing shortage is a scam to enable profiteering for developers that are in the pockets of the government whilst providing totally unnecessary substandard homes
I wonder how many Brown envelopes it took to get this through.
Well you’re a builder Paul, Tell us how many do you give out for your builds?
That would be telling.
The Hospital cannot cope now, it will result in lost lives due to there not being enough
Doctors and Hospital beds.
The plan is to create 15 minute cities and keep people within those cities.
“It’s coming to a Town near you all soon”
Wake up and smell the coffee, start watching real news on YouTube and you will see
what is happening in Oxford and Canterbury etc
They tried to do the same in Thetford, but the people of Thetford stood up to their
Council.
The World Economic Forum control world Governments, look on their website and you will
learn a lot.
Act now before it’s too late.
The Labour Party under Starmer want to extend ULEZ Nationwide, Khan let it slip a few weeks ago.
ULEZ introduced by the Tories you mean. I saw it on YouTube, do your own research people! You utter joke!
Yes and Starmer wants to extend it.
Wake up, don’t be a Muppet all your life.
I hope that finally these stupid shenanigans will stop and the construction of urgently needed houses will begin in earnest! Most of the protesters have no idea as to what it means to be short of houses. probably because they are sitting comfortably in theirs already!
Take a look on Rightmove, there’s hundreds of properties of all sizes and types for sale.
There’s no shortage of houses for sale, but a shortage of decent affordable rental properties, which this development will not be producing.
The Island needs free homes for the homeless, free homes for working people who have lost their home through no fault of their own, free homes for nurses and doctors and free adapted homes for the disabled. Not free homes for a load of deliberately self inflicted smack/piss heads getting more money in free handouts than a workman brings home for grafting all week.This will end up yet another lovely area poisoned by lowlife and their uncontrolled feral brats just like all the others put to the same use. Forget all this B/S about ”affordable homes” Would you want to pay a lifelong mortgage for a home surrounded by multiple low life, I’m bloody sure I wouldn’t, because that is what it will be like.
I wonder how many councilors and planners live in any of the areas that they allow these multiple free smack/swill huts to be built. If any of them did, the plans would face immediate and constant refusal to be granted. Real strange that eh!
Harcourt Sands has been empty since 2006, its been partially demolished but still remains empty it is roughly the same size as Westridge Farm and within 1/2 mile from it but still nothing built on it. So Westridge Farm greenbelt and was a working dairy and yet that is now to be built on where is the sense and what are the Planning Department of our council thinking I guess they have no sense when it comes to planning.
Gary the planning department on the island could not organise a p*ss up in a Brewery.
There are also numerous derelict Hotels on the Island including the old Royal York Hotel in Ryde
that could be used.
Not all immigrants are illegal.Some are actually fleeing countries that we have had a hand in wrecking
Dont believe the press and the goverment hysteria that all our problems are because of immigration
The goverment have failed to build enough affordable homes to rent or buy.Social housing has been sold off and not replaced.Private landlords have been taxed out of the rental market
The govertment and thier rightwing media cronies need a scapegoat to lay blame at and gulible people to buy thier lies.Hence some of the above comments
talking out of your backside john doe – those fleeing could claim asylum in the first country they stepped over the border into, but no, they decide to travel half way across the world through countless countries to turn up here.
they are not welcome and not wanted.
and perhaps if society wasn’t so burdened with hand wringing, do gooding lefty clowns, wanting the doors open, we could have simply rounded them up and shipped them back or shot the dinghies before they got off the beach in france.
Enjoy your new neighbours.
The council don’t give a stuff about locals or countryside, all they see is the amount of cash they will rake in from council tax. As I said in many posts before, the island is finished as a “nice” place. Notice how quiet our ever idiotic, so called MP is on this. Sausages are on him everyone.
Where is Bob in all this I wonder?