A proposed mixed-use development with at least 60 homes and a retail outlet is facing continuing opposition from residents and campaigners.
Over 2 dozen objections have been filed with the Isle of Wight Council against Stephen Hucklesby’s revised outline plans for Heathfield Farm Campsite next to Freshwater’s Colwell Road.
The proposal’s opponents include the Empowering Islanders county councillors, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, Freshwater Parish Council and Freshwater Community Speedwatch.
Mr Hucklesby’s agent, ERMC, say the scheme represents a strong opportunity to deliver quality housing in a sustainable location, with direct links to local infrastructure and services.
A protest against the bid was held outside the campsite on Sunday 1st February.
Concerns include the loss of an award-winning wildlife haven with species such as red squirrels and bats, losing an established tourist asset and pollution and nitrate runoff into the Solent.
The scheme’s critics have also raised issues such as a lack of local services capacity, a ‘severe cumulative highways impact’, pedestrian and road safety and harm to the character of Heathfield Road and the surrounding landscape.
Freshwater North and Yarmouth county councillor Peter Spink has applied for the plans to go before County Hall’s planning committee.
Planning considerations he mentioned in his email to the Isle of Wight Council included the loss of a ‘green lung’ for residents, the urbanising effect of a major development and the impact of its surface water draining to an area with ‘pre-existing issues of drainage, erosion and land instability’.
An ERMC spokesperson told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS):
“It will be reassuring for local residents to understand that the consulting ecological team have carefully surveyed, logged and recorded all habitats across the site and provided suitable mitigation measures.
“These include relocating protected habitats within the site itself and seeking to maintain the established biodiversity of wildlife within the site boundaries and across the wider local environment.
“The revised proposals have reduced the scale of development, as recommended by policy, in response to the presence of key ecological features identified.”
They added the development will provide a meaningful contribution to affordable housing within the West Wight, an area ‘poorly supported with new affordable homes for the last decade’.
And the average age of people in the photo is…….65 ish,yet again,nimbys that retired here are upset.
The island infrastructure is shite, look at the “one”
hospital on the island, what services do they offer!,
very minimal services.
Majority of patients have to go to Soton or Pompey
for treatment.
The more home that continue to be built, the more the prospect of flooding continues to increase. LOGICS. The more places the rain water can’t soak in because the land has been concreted over, the more it will piss out somewhere else!
“the scheme represents a strong opportunity to deliver quality housing in a sustainable location, with direct links to local infrastructure and services”. But that infrastructure and those services are already overstretched. Even if all the other objections could be overcome, the infrastructure would still need to be increased to support the demands of the occupants of a further 60 dwellings.
Totally agree, perhaps if we got funding to replace or update the islands infrastructure first people would be less upset.
More homes not needed on this crumbling isle.
Just renovate all the derelicted buildings and
hey presto new homes without the need of building
more homes.
No doubt the protesters already have nice homes. It’s the government’s fault for not controlling immigration, now there’s not enough houses. If it was their land they wouldn’t refuse the windfall sale of the land.