A plan to build a 27-home estate at a Herefordshire village has been resubmitted with a “more efficient” layout and different house designs.

The land around Faraday House, Madley, six miles west of Hereford, has a complex planning history going back to 2008, and several proposals and amendments have being submitted since.

Work has since begun on a plan, given detailed approval in 2019, to build 10 bungalows on the southern part of the field.

In 2020, a separate bid for 27 new homes in the larger northern section of the same field, one-third of which would be affordable, was also given full approval.

Now Gloucestershire-based developer Bell Homes wants to “enhance the development overall by rationalising inefficient elements of the consented scheme”, its application says.

The proposed changes to the layout would “result in greater margin of garden space around the periphery of the site”, and reduce the number of homes exposed to road traffic noise.

They also cut the amount of hardstanding in the form of the estate road, turning and parking areas.

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The newly proposed housing mix consists of seven two-bedroom, 13 three-bedroom and seven four-bedroom properties – an increase of four three-bedroom properties.

This, the application says, is closer to the mix sought by the county’s latest Local Housing Market Assessment, which says three-bedroom homes account for half of all homes needed in the county.

Within these figures, the mix of affordable homes would be six two-bedroom and three three-bedroom – figures agreed by the council’s housing officer at the pre-application stage.

The new application also includes a detailed landscaping scheme, including a native hedge and specimen trees – a requirement of the previous approval.

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“The planning permission is now… capable of lawful implementation prior to May 4, 2022, and it is the applicant’s intention to make a material start within this timeframe,” the application says – with the already approved plan “a legitimate fall-back position”.

The developer's website also says it expects to start in spring, “with first occupations taking place in winter 2022.”

Both plots were marketed together in 2017, for “offers in excess of £1,590,000”.