Plans for 37 homes on the edge of a South Lakeland village have been unanimously rejected by the district council’s planning committee.
The submission from L&W Wilson (Higham) Ltd proved controversial, with it receiving a total of 27 representations.
Opponents expressed concerns about an increase in traffic and a perceived lack of the necessary infrastructure to cope with the scheme at Allithwaite.
The site, off Locker Lane and the B5277, would have been made up of a mixture of one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom properties, 13 of them affordable.
To the south, it would have wrapped around a cluster of existing buildings, including Barn Hey and Barn Hey Cottage, which are Grade II listed.
Properties at numbers 14 to 37 would have had their own driveways, with 14 to 20, 25, 33 and 34 having single garages. Numbers one to 13 would have been served by a 24-space parking area.
In a report produced ahead of a meeting of South Lakeland District Council’s planning committee, case officer Liz Arnold recommended the application for refusal.
In her list of reasons, she said around 0.33 hectares of the site lay outside the Allithwaite development boundary and the Barn Hey housing allocation.
“The dwellings located within this section constitute new houses within the open countryside,” she said. “New dwellings within the open countryside must have an essential requirement providing robust evidence for the housing need and be 100 per cent affordable in perpetuity.
“All of the proposed dwellings in this location are open market and no evidence for their need has been presented.”
Ms Arnold also said the properties were ‘not considered to be of a particularly high quality’, offered ‘little in the way of architectural interest or identity’ and lacked ‘any real sense of place’.
She referred to the ‘overbearing impact’ of the development on heritage assets and its ‘unacceptable impact’ on landscape character.
The planning committee heard a new, late application had been submitted prior to the meeting but it had ‘not really dealt with the reasons for refusal’ in the opinion of planning officers.
