Estates planned to create 160 homes
TWO estates providing 161 homes could be built in the Skelmersdale area. Morris Homes has submitted a planning application to build 116 houses in Up Holland, and 45 houses in Digmoor to West Lancashire Borough Council.
The 116 would be on a 4.96 hectare (12¼ acre) site on Chequer Lane.
The proposal is for 18 three bedroom semi-detached houses, 21 three-bedroom detached houses and 77 four-bedroom detached houses.
Each home would have at least two parking spaces, to prevent parking on the road.
After receiving queries from local residents about potential loss of landscaping, the report said: “The applicant is keen to retain existing landscape features where possible and has largely retained all existing trees/hedgerows located around the periphery of the site.
“The triangular area of woodland located west of Chequer Lane is also retained.”
The land on which Morris Homes plans to build will already see the contraction of 66 homes from Wainhomes, meaning that the new proposal aims to bring the total to 180.
Morris Homes also said that the proposed homes would have adequate access to transport.
The application says: “The site is located just 650m from Up Holland train station; the station is on the Kirkby branch line from Wigan Wallgate station.
“Up Holland is served by one train per hour in each direction, towards Manchester, Blackburn and Kirkby.
“This provides wider employment opportunities for the settlement.”
The application also says that the new homes will be beneficial for the town, for local residents and businesses.
None of the houses proposed for Up Holland will be classed as “affordable”, however, as the developer has proposed to build 45 affordable houses in Digmoor.
The proposal states: “The application does not propose any affordable housing on the site and instead the applicant proposes to provide 100% affordable units on a site closer to the centre of Skelmersdale.
“The site, land west of Abbeystead, is subject to a separate application for 45 dwellings, all of which are proposed to be affordable. By providing 45 affordable dwellings, it more than meets the affordable requirements of the Chequer Lane site, which at 30% requires 35 dwellings of the 116 to be provided as affordable.”
The proposed Digmoor site, which covers an area of 1.8 hectares (4½ acres), is vacant greenfield land off Gillibrands Road.
Morris Homes has proposed to build 45 “high quality family homes”: four one-bedroom apartments, two two-bedroom apartments, 32 three-bedroom mews and semi-detached houses and seven twobedroom elderly bungalows.
The proposal says: “All the homes on the site will be low cost and affordable homes to help support local needs. The scheme ... is sympathetic to the character and context of the local area with a pattern of streets and positioning of the houses that will ensure privacy whilst maximising views out of the site to the retained woodland and beyond.”