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Sandymoor South and Wharford Farm

Runcorn, UK

º£½ÇÊÓƵ provided a broad range of technical services to support the outline planning applications of two adjacent sites on 43-hectares of previous agricultural land near Runcorn. Homes England took these schemes to Outline Planning due to their complex nature, with a vision for delivering up to 850 much-needed new homes.

The adjacent sites on greenfield land near Runcorn will provide up to 850 new homes.

Our experts delivered an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), which acted as a key enabler to delivering the project through the outline planning stage.

Our team advised on sustainable urban drainage systems (SuDS) in an integrated way to deliver benefits for biodiversity.

We provided key engagement with multiple stakeholders, including statutory consultees and a range of technical experts across the design team.

Challenge

Our team worked to overcome a range of constraints, including the West Coast mainline bordering one edge and the Bridgewater Canal bordering the other, an adjacent flood alleviation zone managed by Halton Borough Council, overhead power lines crossing the sites and a railway line bisecting through.

With the sites also surrounded and intersected with land owned by other parties, our team has been pivotal in supporting the client with the assessments required to define and agree access points. We developed a series of access options for the site, ensuring that the maximum residential capacity could be achieved.

Homes England is committed to securing planning permission on these sites and to ensure that they are unlocked to deliver residential development. Our experts key role was to support the client in manoeuvring the project to successfully achieve outline planning permission.

Solution

Our experts delivered the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), which acted as a key enabler to delivering the project through the outline planning stage. Delivering the EIA and Environmental Statement (ES) scope, with its many technical services and its role in identifying and ideating solutions for any early stage challenges, is key to achieving outline planning permission. The social aspects of the EIA include assessments of elements such as the availability of school places and access to local GP surgeries, as well as considering the economic impact in terms of jobs created in the construction period.

As a design team we were able to demonstrate that the proposed schemes are technically deliverable, such that at Examination in Public (EiP) both sites are deemed viable, allowing the inspector to support their continued allocation in the local area development plan.

Early in the project we compiled an assessment of all the known constraints from open-source data and mapped them in GIS. This provided the team with an early view on the main constraints and allowed solutions to be developed, and key stakeholders identified, from an early stage – including the impacts on trip generation and the appropriate siting of various sustainable urban drainage (SuDS) features. Identifying constraints has allowed a proactive approach to de-risking the site and reduced the risk of the programme being unnecessarily drawn out by delays.

Together with the masterplanners, we developed the strategies around the public realm, mobility routes and green/blue infrastructure. As an example, we have maintained a local stream as a central element to one section of the masterplan as part of the drainage strategy. As well as preserving an important ecology corridor for water voles, the stream corridor has been combined with the site-wide sustainable drainage strategy to deliver efficient attenuation.

Our experts delivered the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), which acted as a key enabler to delivering the project through the outline planning stage. Image: Homes England.

Value

Homes England is likely to take the site to the market on a phased basis and so the design team’s strategy was centred around the need to ensure that the planning permissions secured allow for the viable delivery of residential infrastructure across the entire site, whilst achieving great placemaking and delivering much needed new homes and community facilities.

Our experts delivered a broad range of technical services and insight, de-risking any environmental challenges for the site ahead of the planning process, as well as providing key engagement with multiple stakeholders, including statutory consultees, as well as a range of technical experts across the design team.