North Somerset Council’s planning committee voted to refuse planning permission for Woodstock Homes to build the homes on fields next to Churchill on 17 of July. As the decision went against the recommendation of the council’s planning officers, council rules required it come back before the committee to be ratified. But, in a surprise move, instead of ratifying their previous decision, members of the planning committee instead voted 7-3 to grant planning permission for the homes to go ahead.
Vice chair of Churchill Parish Council David Johnson, who had addressed the committee to urge them to stand by their decision, said that the U-turn was “not at all” expected. He said: “I would have said between last meeting and this meeting there has been an apparent change of the ground rules. “The debate in the July meeting was very much about sustainability.
It was about the strategic gap and it was about the Mendip Hills which we would assert was the easiest grounds to dismiss.” The homes, eight of which would be affordable, would be built on a field on the east side of Hillier’s Lane which would “infill” between the village and a group of homes on Dinghurst Road, with a smaller field next to the homes to become an orchard. But the homes would be located in an area set to be demarcated as a “strategic gap” between Churchill and Sandford in North Somerset’s upcoming new local plan.
Although not located within the Mendip Hills National Landscape, also formerly.