Plan refused for homes near former council offices

Councillors voted against plans to build new flats in Wincanton

Plans to build new homes near former council offices in Somerset have been unanimously refused by local councillors.

The Churchfields building in Wincanton town centre served as offices for South Somerset District Council for many years. Part of the building was also leased to Avon and Somerset Constabulary and a local nursery.

But Somerset Council's planning committee south, which covers the former South Somerset area, has rejected the proposals, arguing there would be too few parking spaces for the new residents.

The committee voted against the plans following less than an hour's debate, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

The council signalled its plan to sell the building in June 2019. Developer Arlington (Wincanton) Ltd. then secured planning permission in September 2022 to convert the vacant building into 15 flats.

The same company recently applied to build four additional houses on the land behind the former offices that had originally been used by the police for parking.

The new homes would have been accessed from the existing spur onto Churchfields, which feeds onto the existing one-way system in Wincanton town centre.

The development would have been a mixture of two and three bedroom homes, to be sold at market rate and with provision for only six parking spaces in total.

Howard Ellard, chairman of Wincanton Town Council, spoke against the plans when the planning committee south met in Yeovil on 28 March.

He said: "My property is the closest residence to the proposed dwellings – it's less than six metres away.

“Parking is already very stretched in Wincanton, and particularly in Churchfields, and there is very little public transport. You have failed to take account of these issues.

"When the applicant made his original application to turn the offices into flats, we were very supportive of that; we thought it was an excellent, self-contained scheme and brought a derelict site back into residential use.

"But this application, we feel, is like trying to fit a quart into a pint pot."