The community is divided over whether resubmitted plans for a 2,300-bed student village on the green belt will be good or bad for Chester.
The full meeting of Cheshire West and Chester Council, on Thursday, October 3, will determine Bell Developments’ plans for the village and associated Steve Redgrave sports institute on farmland between Blacon and Mollington.
The constitution was changed to allow the council to sit as a planning committee at Chester Town Hall although, even if passed, it will have to go to Secretary of State Eric Pickles for final approval as a departure from national policy.
Avril Coady, secretary of the Canal Basin Forum, who will address the meeting, sees the student village as a ‘light at the end of a tunnel’ for residents living near the university.
“The sheer number of students in this area lends itself to noise, anti-social behaviour and damage,” said Mrs Coady, who joined a TV crew who are covering the student village saga for BBC2 series The Planners. “The filth, the language and the abuse that night was unbelievable,” she added.
However, Becca Nelson, from Cheshire Campaign to Protect Rural England, supports the council planning officer’s view the application does not meet the ‘very special circumstances’ test necessary on green belt land. She added: “This particular section of green belt targeted by this plan performs a vital function in maintaining the separation of distinct settlements.”
The resubmitted student village application was due to be determined by the strategic planning committee. But concerns were raised following the removal of its former chairman Myles Hogg, who voted against the original student village application, and his replacement by Cllr Howard Greenwood, a property developer with past business links to Bell in 2011.
This led a gang of four rebel Tory councillors and a Lib Dem to submit and win a motion at a special council meeting calling for full council to determine the application.
A Freedom of Information response to The Chronicle suggests council chief executive Steve Robinson was ambivalent about the benefits of this course of action.
He told Labour leader Cllr Justin Madders that taking the application to full council would “avoid any accusation the strategic planning committee had been stacked to approve the village application”.
But in another email he warned such a proposal would ‘politicise the issue even further’ and ‘raise again the accusation that political group whips will be applied at the planning decision-making’.
