A HOUSEBUILDING assault on Wellington began this week with the formal submission of a planning application for 315 new homes and a mini shopping centre in Rockwell Green.

The plans have been put forward by Gladman Developments Ltd, which has been labelled a ‘predatory’ company specialising in winning permission for sites which are outside council boundaries for building.

In 2018, Gladman controversially won permission to build 205 homes on fields off Exeter Road, Rockwell Green, despite the then-borough council’s local plan listing it as out of bounds for development.

Now, the company has returned with plans for 315 homes on 38.5 acres of fields on the opposite side of Exeter Road, wrapping around the Pitt Farm mobile home site and Dobree Park estate and reaching as far as the main railway line through Westford.

The move comes shortly after a similarly-motivated company, Carden Group, revealed proposals for up to 293 new homes on the eastern side of Wellington, in fields opposite the new Lidl supermarket, which falls into West Buckland parish and stretches from Taunton Road to the railway line.

Housing developers have started to target the town because the former Somerset West and Taunton Council (SWT) left the district without a new local plan which would strictly control new building.

The existing local plan expires in four years’ time and although the process of drawing up a new one was started, SWT took a political decision in 2020 to abandon it and leave it for a new unitary Somerset Council which was being formed.

The unitary council came into being in April of this year and has said a new plan could take another five years to complete.

In the meantime, Wellington has been left in what developers call a ‘planning policy gap’, where old policies carry little weight and new ones have not emerged, resulting in a planning free-for-all.

Somerset Council has opened Gladman’s new plans for public consultation which runs until November 10 and has set itself a target of January 15, 2024, to either approve or reject them.

Gladman said this week it had completed a ‘comprehensive programme of community engagement’ which was considered appropriate for its proposed Rockwell Green site.

The company launched a consultation website, wrote to Rockwell Green residents and local councillors, and unsuccessfully tried to engage with Wellington Town Council.

Gladman said its proposals for 315 homes – reduced from 420 which was originally suggested – would mean more than 700 residents who could generate more than £10 million for the local economy.

It said the build time for the new estate would be nine years, with more than 650 jobs directly and indirectly created, and £37 million spent on construction of the estate.

Extra council tax income for local councils from the new residents would amount to about £6.2 million over 10 years, plus the local authority would receive about £1.7 million over four years in Government new homes bonus payments.

Gladman said an ongoing housing crisis in the UK had been intensified by under-delivery as new building had not kept up with population growth, resulting in millions of people being left ‘in need’.

A community infrastructure levy of slightly more than £3 million would be payable on the new homes because they would be outside the town’s development boundary, of which nearly £460,000 would go to the town council.

Gladman said the proposed shopping centre should create 24 full-time equivalent jobs and would be located off Exeter Road and it already had interest from a ‘well-known retail operator’ with stores across Taunton Deane which had contributed £44 million of ‘gross value added’.

The new housing would a mix of one, two, three and four-bedroom properties and 25 per cent, or 79, would be ‘affordable homes’.

The company said the development included community allotments.