New warehouse proposals could create over 270 jobs
MORE than 250 jobs are set to be created through large new warehouse and factory buildings on a Derbyshire industrial estate.
The plans, from Clowes Developments and Owen Greenings and Mumford Holdings Limited (OGM), are to build two new warehouses totalling 20,000 square metres of floor space at Dove Valley Park, in Foston.
Papers submitted with the application to South Derbyshire District Council detail that the plans would create 270 jobs.
Council planning officers were recommending that the project be approved at a meeting due to take place yesterday, Tuesday, October 18, when councillors would make a final decision.
One of the plots, from OGM, would be for national plastic manufacturing with the structure standing at 11.7 metres tall at its highest point. This unit would include 60 car parking spaces and 90 jobs.
Meanwhile, the second unit, from Clowes Developments, is purely “speculative” and would include 144 parking spaces and create 180 jobs.
Council officers said that this part of Dove Valley Park has long been allocated as land for a 200-lorry roadside parking site with refuelling stations and driver facilities such as beds, showers and a cafe – a rest-stop for HGV drivers. This allocation still sits in the current Derbyshire Local Transport Plan, which covers up to 2028.
Permission was granted for a lorry park in 2007, and then again in 2011, but was never implemented. The applicants say this was due to a “lack of market demand”.
District council economic development officers say that the proposed units could “directly deliver a significant number of employment opportunities”.
They continue: “These come at a time when the population of South Derbyshire is growing rapidly, potentially leading to increased levels of out-commuting. If the current proposals are realised, the employment creation could include valuable jobs in the manufacturing sector.”
The officials detail that the service station at Willington, off the A50/A38 Toyota roundabout, opened in the period between the lorry park being approved and now, which contains HGV parking and refuelling, along with a hotel.
Council planners say that other lorry parking sites opening within 50 miles of Foston will have caused a “reduced demand for lorry parking around the site, undermining the viability of such a use at the site”.
They say: “It is accepted that there is little reasonable prospect of an application coming forward for a lorry park on the site.
“The allocation of the site for development, albeit a different use to that proposed, acknowledges that the site is suitable for an employment/economic-related development and is not intended to form part of the open countryside.
“Dove Valley Park is an important strategic allocation that will allow the district to take advantage of identified demand of employment development in the A50 corridor on an established site that offers immediate access to the trunk road network.
“The application will result in construction and operational full-time jobs, which is also very likely to be greater than that created by a lorry park.”
The plans received two objection letters from residents in the area, asking that the roads to the site were limited to 40mph, and saying that air quality and related traffic would be harmful to those living nearby, and that the impact of increased noise from traffic and the operational facilities would also be unwelcome.