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A bid by a Herefordshire fruit farm for permission to turn an old packhouse into a home has been knocked back by planners.

Man of Ross Ltd, based at Glewstone west of Ross-on-Wye within the Wye Valley national landscape (formerly AONB), applied to convert the single-storey corrugated iron-clad building into a three-bedroom home, which it said would be “well-suited to local housing need”.

A similar plan was refused permission in 2022, given the amount of work required to convert the building and a lack of capacity in the water connection, while any impact on local river systems had not been made clear.

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The more recent application sought to overcome these with a new structural survey setting out the viability of retaining much of the walls and concrete floor, and ecological assessment.

The new house would also use a private water supply, it explained.

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Marstow parish council did not object to the revised plan, nor were there any public objections.

But planning officer Emma Aram said the new survey “raises the same concerns regarding the condition of the packhouse as the previous survey”, and “only serves to re-iterate that it is in a poor state of repair both in relation to the external cladding and the timber frame structure”.

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So even though the other reasons for the previous refusal had been addressed, she considered that the building still needed “major reconstruction through the replacement of the roof, wall coverings and floors” and possibly also the timbers.

There were “too many issues to demonstrate that this is a true conversion project and not a re-build”, she concluded.

Planning permission was refused.