We had a productive Neighbourhood Plan meeting in Almondsbury on the evening of Thursday 26th March, where the public was invited to express their concerns and hopes for the sites identified for development in the South Gloucestershire Local Plan.
There were comments about building style, issues around traffic and flooding, and retention of hedges, trees and existing footpaths.
Please see the SGC Local Plan Sites section on the website for maps for the sites discussed.
The next public meeting will be in Easter Compton on May 12th, details to be published in due course.
We live at Gable Close, Easter Compton, directly on the boundary of the proposed development land. The fields that would be built on are immediately behind our homes.
Our concerns are specific and serious. Gable Close and the adjacent Prospect Close are narrow residential cul-de-sacs with a tight junction and no capacity for additional traffic. Yet the developer’s own concept masterplan for site PSB1 (Church Farm) shows the proposed site gateways connecting directly onto roads running past our street, with no dedicated construction access route shown that avoids existing residential streets.
We have read paragraph 5.56 of the council’s own Phase 3 consultation document, which openly states: “Further work will be required to understand the impact on the current local road network in particular at the M5 Motorway Junction 17 and how best to provide new primary education places in the village to support this growth. These site promotions at Easter Compton are not without constraints.” The council is therefore asking the community to respond to proposals it admits are not yet properly evidenced.
We also note that across all the consultation lenses published by South Gloucestershire Council, Easter Compton is being considered for multiple overlapping sites — PSB1 (230 homes, Emerging Preferred Strategy), EPS-PSB1, EPS-PSB2, EPS-PSB4 and EPS-PSB5 (referenced in paragraph 5.56), L2-PSB1 (500 homes, Lens 2 Urban Edge Appendix 2), L2-PSB2 (67 homes, Lens 2 Urban Edge Appendix 2) and L2-PSB9 (1,500 homes, Lens 2 Urban Edge Appendix 2) — representing potentially over 2,000 homes in and around the village. No cumulative traffic or infrastructure assessment appears to have been carried out across these overlapping proposals.
Furthermore, the council’s own transport principles, set out in Section 5 of the Phase 3 consultation, state an intention to locate development in places that avoid high reliance on private car travel. Easter Compton has no railway station and no meaningful bus service, and does not meet this criterion.
We will be attending the 12th May meeting and would urge the Neighbourhood Plan steering group to formally object to all Easter Compton allocations until the outstanding evidence work acknowledged in paragraph 5.56 is completed and published for public scrutiny.