A legal challenge to plans which included a new ground for Hereford Rugby Club has been dismissed in the High Court.
This article comes from the Planning Resource Website.
Hereford Rugby Club plans to leave its existing ground on the banks of the River Wye and move to a new home on farmland off Holywell Gutter Lane.
With an eye to joining rugby's top flight, the club is planning a string of world-class pitches, all weather training facilities, a 400-seater stand, an indoor training facility and a car park with 250 spaces.
In partnership with developers, Bloor Homes Limited, the club says the project will be funded by construction of 190 homes – 35 per cent of them ‘affordable’ - and, as part of the deal, Herefordshire Council will inherit the club's old ground at a nominal price.
Council officers recommended that planning permission for the scheme be refused, expressing concerns about the landscape and visual impact on orchards that have marked the city's boundaries for centuries.
However, in June last year, members of the council's planning committee went their own way and approved the club's proposals, which would cover a greenfield site of over 20 hectares just outside the city.
At London's High Court, Hampton Bishop Parish Council - within whose remit the development will fall - challenged the committee's decision, claiming irrelevant factors had been taken into account and that it flew in the face of local planning policies.
However, judge Mr Justice Hickinbottom dismissed each and every one of the parish council's complaints.
The parish council claimed the committee members should have put the prospect of Herefordshire getting its hand on the club's old ground effectively for free entirely out of their minds when considering the plans.
But the judge said the club's proposal to give away its old ground were "directly related" to the overall development scheme and had been rightly taken into account by the committee as a "relevant planning consideration".
Rightly focusing on the economic viability of the scheme and the future of the game of rugby in Hereford, the committee had accepted that the 190 new homes were necessary to fund a project which the club would otherwise never have been able to afford.
Rejecting the parish council's argument that the committee's decision breached the local development plan policy, the judge said the committee had considered alternative sites before concluding that only an out-of-town location would be viable.
Dismissing the parish council's judicial review challenge, the judge said the committee was entitled to take a flexible approach to the complex issues involved and had also adequately taken into account the development's environmental impact.