More than 600 new homes could be built on a Chorleywood Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty as plans were resubmitted just months after a larger plan by a developer was dropped.
The application by planning agent Savills, on behalf of the Chiltern Hills Golf Club, was confirmed by Three Rivers District Council.
It would see 675 homes and a two-form entry primary school built on the 55.8-acre site east of Green Street, which is currently used for cattle grazing.
It comes just months after Savills withdrew their appeal to the planning inspectorate last October following the rejection of plans for 800 homes on the same site in March 2023.
In the application, confirmed on Monday, the agent admits that the plot’s location in the Green Belt and Chiltern’s Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) “will bring a level of harm”, but maintains that the public benefit of providing new homes outweighed this.
It claims that housing supply in the area is “significantly short of meeting need” and that 338 or 50 per cent of the planned delivery will be classed as affordable.
The development would provide 126 one-bedroom homes, 204 two-bedroom homes, 257 three-bedroom homes and 88 four-bedroom homes.
A mixture of semi-detached and terraced houses, maisonettes and apartment blocks would be built on the site, with most at two-storeys high and a maximum of three floors.
Plans for a primary school, which would have two classes for each year, would also meet the “needs of the development and the wider community”.
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The land is owned by the Chiltern Hills Golf Club which operates a partially-completed 18-hole course on the west side of Green Street.
The council previously decided that plans for 800 homes on the fields constituted “inappropriate development within the Green Belt” and that it would not conserve or enhance the AONB.
When it was debated last March, then-councillor Alison Wall (Con, Chorleywood North and Sarratt) warned that approving the development could unlock a “massive sprawling conurbation all the way to Oxford”.
Savills appealed to the government planning inspectorate following the refusal, but decided to withdraw it last October in order to further revise the plans.
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