brentwood.gov.uk

Development on site R14 should be on a reasonable scale only.

Policy R14 - William Hunter Way Car Park

This site is down in the plan for 300 dwellings on a developable area of 1.22ha - a density of just under 246 per hectare.
As recently as March 2017 the Urban Designers Levitt Bernstein, producing Design Plan & Feasibility Studies on behalf of the council, focussed their suggestions for this site around a figure of 179 residential units. The detailed work up that they completed was recommending this number so that "the frontage and scale of buildings along William Hunter Way is a response to the Conservation Area south of the site (including High street) and the heights along the east, west and north edges [which] respond to the low rise surrounding development that consist mainly of 2-3 storey housing." The detailed proposal containing these figures however included a proposal for only 282 parking bays on the site, when the council has often repeated its commitment to retaining the existing number of parking bays (372+29) on site. Levitt Bernstein did also examine other scenarios. One again with 279 residential units and 615 car parking spaces, but no retail or leisure elements; and one with as many as 231 residential units, no extra car parking for any of these, or the retail and leisure aspects of the scheme. According to their analysis achieving this number of residential units and parking spaces would require two expensive levels of underground car parking to work. Give the detailed work by Levitt Bernstein we can already see that any development proposal that includes the number of parking spaces the council wants, and the retail/leisure aspect the council wants cannot also include as many as 300 dwellings. Levitt Bernstein's expensive and expert advice should have been paid attention to in the Plan's proposal - it has not been.
As recently as November 2017 the council were not making any statements about the number of residential properties to be proposed for this site. When, as a member of the council's Local Plan Working Group, we got to see the proposal in January 2018 for 300 units on this site it became very clear that the reason for such a high number was the fact that the nearby Baytree Centre site - which had been down for 200 further flats in recent previous Plan versions - now had no residential figures attached to it at all. There had been no work to provide an evidence basis for a 300 flat proposal on this site between November 2017 and January 2018, and there has been none since.