Extra Travellers' pitches approved - Cambridgeshire

From the Cambridge News

Expansion of a Travellers’ site has been approved despite calls for a line to be drawn in the green belt.

Councillors today overturned their own officers’ advice to approve another seven pitches in Chesterton Fen Road - which is already home to large caravan parks.

Members of South Cambridgeshire District Council’s planning committee also granted permanent permission for 48 existing plots.

The 30 pitches at Sandy Park and another 18 on neighbouring West View Park had been unauthorised since a temporary consent expired in 2011.

Cllr Hazel Smith, who represents Milton, argued there should be no extra caravans.

She said: “People I’ve spoken to living in Fen Road, in the settled community and the Traveller community, don’t want Chesterton Fen to accommodate ever-increasing numbers and feel development has gone far enough.

“It’s already far bigger than the ideal size and the fact it works well is a tribute to the people who live there.

“A line has to be drawn somewhere.”

But Cllr Nick Wright, the council’s cabinet member for planning, argued the seven new pitches on an old coal yard should be viewed as a “gift horse” because 20 new pitches needed to be found in the district.

He said the same issues which had applied to Sandy Park and West View Park applied to the seven new plots, adding that the failure to find any plots in Cambridge itself had put additional pressure on Fen Road.

Cllr Wright said: “We still have this immense need to find pitches in South Cambridgeshire and, with the integration achieved at Milton, this seems a very appropriate site to me.”

The coal yard application was approved by six votes to five, while the two existing sites - which were subject to a warning that refusal could infringe Travellers’ human rights - went through unanimously.

Gamlingay’s Cllr Sebastian Kindersley warned plans should be made to accommodate Travellers who may be forced out of Fen Road by developers as land values soar when Cambridge’s second train station is built at Chesterton sidings.

see aslo: The BBC - Cambridgeshire planners approve permanent Traveller sites