A controversial bid to build 20 homes on a field in a Herefordshire village has been rejected.

The plan for Stoke Lacy, near Bromyard, drew widespread local opposition, prompting an extraordinary parish council meeting in November.

Now Herefordshire Council’s principal planner Carl Brace has ruled that the proposal was in “significant conflict” with Herefordshire’s Core Strategy, which sets out planning priorities and restrictions across the county, on a number of issues.

It would “create additional phosphate pathways” into the river Lugg special area of conservation (SAC), while no offsetting or nutrient mitigation scheme to address this had been put forward. This put it in conflict with both local and national planning policy, he said.

The council’s drainage engineer considered the foul water drainage system proposed to be “unacceptable”.

Though outside Stoke Lacy’s settlement boundary, the proposal “in principle, is an acceptable location for development”, Mr Brace said. But local and national design standards on access by road and foot “have not been met or demonstrated”.

And he felt the design fell short of recent national policy requiring developments to be visually attractive and sympathetic to their surroundings. “The limited use of local vernacular and materials and suburban design aesthetics are not a suitable or beautiful response to context,” he said.

Nor could the council support the proposed mix of housing sizes and tenures. The bid did “not take into account” pre-application advice on this from housing officers, and its three- and four-bedroom designs for open-market sale would be “top-heavy” relative to local demand.

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Given these conflicts, the plan could only go ahead if there were an overriding reason within national planning policy, such as an inadequate rate of local housebuilding.

Councils that can demonstrate a pipeline of sites that will meet their undertakings to permit volumes of new housing five years or more into the future, are not obliged to approve “speculative” building bids that do not accord with local development plans.

Herefordshire Council announced last April that it could demonstrate a land supply of 6.9 years, while its delivery of new housing over the previous three years was not so low as to provide an overriding reason to approve new schemes.

Meanwhile, the site’s location within the protected river catchment provided another reason why national policy did not trump local policy in this case, Mr Brace’s report said.

Stoke Lacy parish council, the local county councillor, the council’s transport, landscape and ecology officers, and 32 local residents lodged objections to the scheme, although landscape and open spaces officers supported it.

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