Sunday, December 17, 2017

Springfield submit planning application for 115 houses on Liz's land - just beyond the existing Lochloy housing schemes

The application reads: "Residential Development and Associated Infrastructure at South Kingsteps, Nairn (NA2)" 

The potential for development on this land has caused a few problems for Cllr Liz MacDonald for some time now, and effectively silenced her from commenting on other local large scale planning applications in recent times although she has latterly made contributions to elements of the local planning and housing debates.

Some of her comment on housing development issues was directed  towards River Community Council and what she had to say about them and their response have been detailed in recent editions of the Nairnshire Telegraph. This Inverness Courier article explains the dilemma she faced when it came to the controversial South Nairn planning application: " Lawyers warn ex-provost to stay out of row over Nairn South planning controversy"

Gurnites can browse the application here, there is extensive detailed documentation supporting the application under the "documents" tab on that page.

Part of a planning support document reads:

"The proposed housing is aimed to provide a much-needed new homes for families, first time buyers and older people in a range of detached, semi- detached houses and flats. This would be in a development that would be well laid out and landscaped to ensure that it allows for the long-term sensitive urban extension of the existing settlement through well connected and landscaped housing. In response to neighbours concerns regarding the scale of development in the Northern portion of the site two storey properties have been replaced with single storey properties. 

Our proposals are intended as a sustainable, natural next-phase expansion of Nairn to the immediate east of the existing town on an allocated site. A modern, contemporary form of design will be adopted, along with a layout that reflects current roads standards and Designing Streets approaches. Springfield aims to deliver developments which have a high-quality and distinctive urban realm with an acknowledgment of the six qualities of successful places at its core - distinctive, safe and pleasant, welcoming, adaptable, resource efficient and easy to move around. The houses would be predominantly two-storey semi-detached but with detached houses and a small number of single storey and bungalow properties with established building lines for each row fronting onto principal roads or open spaces. Streetscenes would be broken up by varied house types, landscaping and sensitive boundary treatments."

An extensive Transport Assessment reads:

"The results of this assessment show that the traffic generated by the development proposals will have a negligible impact on the local road network. Background traffic levels are such that the existing junctions all operate well below practical capacity, with no detrimental impact as a result of the proposed development traffic."

One of our regular readers Morton Gillespie told the Gurn:


"Springfield have delivered an early Christmas present to the people of Nairn - a Planning Application to build 115 Houses on McDonald’s field, Kingsteps as part of an extension to the Lochloy Estate. This compares to the 90 houses allowed for in the Local Plan.

The people of Nairn will be pleased to learn that according to the extensive Traffic Impact Study the provision of 115 new houses will have “negligible impact” on the local road network.

This despite the fact that all traffic will be routed through Montgomerie Drive and Lochloy Road to join the A96. Existing users of this busy route may think differently.

Similarly Scottish Water have no objections as they are satisfied that there is sufficient capacity in the Nairn Waste Water Treatment Works.

It’s good to learn that there are currently no infrastructure problems in Nairn and the building of 115 new houses will have no impact.

Best Regards

Morton Gillespie"

Gurn prediction - this application will receive quite a few submissions from members of the public but that may be reduced perhaps by the deadline date of the application being the 15th of January which includes the festive period.

Update: This planning application now being debated on the popular Facebook page Nairn our Town our views. 

Update: A "Badger Survey" on the Council's e-planning file states: "Badgers are active within the development area with a number of active sets and evidence of feeding, trails and older unused sets."