Chelford retirement community plan rejected

Plans for the Holly Tree House site have been refused consent.

In line with officer recommendation, Cheshire East Council’s strategic planning board refused the Chelford proposal, with 11 members voting to reject the application from David Hughes, the former sports retail tycoon.

The Holly Tree Park scheme proposed the demolition of some existing buildings and their replacement by a 60-bed registered care home with isolation facilities, 72 assisted living apartments ranging between one and three bedrooms each in 13 blocks, and a village centre hub building including 14 close-care units and a clinic.

Retained on the site would be a fishing and boating lake, a tennis court, gardens and woodland walks. The plans were initially slated to go before the SPB in October but, with refusal recommended, were withdrawn and tweaked.

Planning documents refer to a 10-acre site being considered, while the whole Holly Tree House estate has previously been marketed at 24 acres in total.

In all, 133 objections were registered locally, but 40+ letters of support were also submitted, while a care needs assessment from Christie & Co suggested a stark undersupply of care beds in the area, a shortage of more than 500 in 2020.

However, the site sits wholly in the Green Belt, and its promoters failed to convince officers that the  threshold of “very special circumstances” required to overcome that weighting had been met.