Newport Gypsy site still on cards despite £5m price

From the South Wales Argus

A Gypsy site in the south of Newport is still on the cards despite claims it could lose the city’s council £5 million.

Last night a Newport council scrutiny committee stuck to its list of recommendations for Gypsy sites in Newport, albeit removing two said by officers to be unworkable.

But a recommendation for a residential Gypsy and traveller site at the Road Safety Centre in Hartridge Farm Road, which the council had wanted to sell to fund a school, was kept in.

The committee’s recommendations for sites to be added to the local development plan (LDP) will now go to cabinet, but the final plan will need the approval of the whole council.

The Argus revealed on Tuesday that a confidential officer valuation said the council stood to lose as much as £5 million if the site was not sold to help pay off the £29 million spent on Llanwern High School as intended.

The meeting followed officer assessment work into the results of a public consultation by a panel within the committee, which resulted in 7,000 responses last year.

Planning officer Mark Hand told the meeting it faced the options of using the large site at Hartridge, which could accommodate three families, or face the prospect of having to split families up on smaller sites. Gareth Price, head of law and standards, said there would be human rights implications if a family was split up.

Councillor Paul Hannon, member of the scrutiny committee for community planning and development, said the value attached to the site was a “hope value”, and that the site values were “arguable”.

He said it was sad a “speedy resolution has been frustrated for what seems to me to be no good reason”.

Hartridge site is preferred

THE group’s recommendations to cabinet are:

● The Road Safety Centre at Hartridge Farm Road as a preferred residential site that could accommodate three families.

● The former Ringland Allotments site as a back-up resdential site if needed

● Land at Celtic Way, Marshfield, as a transit site.

However, two sites from the original recommendations – a transit site at A449 which raised Welsh Government objections over the use of slipways, and a site at Brickyard Lane in Allt-yr-Yn – were dropped.