Councillors granted outline permission on 7 October for up to 38 homes north of Mill Street, Harbury: 44 objections, up to 13 affordable homes and £657,716 for schools.
Up to 38 homes will be built on fields north of Mill Street in Harbury. Stratford-on-Avon District Council’s Planning Committee granted outline permission on Wednesday 7 October, against the objections of the parish council, the ward member and 44 letter-writers. Every councillor who spoke in favour said they were doing so reluctantly.
Harbury is about nine miles east of Stratford-upon-Avon, between Leamington and Southam.
The decision turned on one number. The district cannot show five years’ worth of housing land, so its own policies on where homes should go carry reduced weight. We cover the new land supply figure, 2.43 years, in a separate story today.
What was approved
Application 25/02712/OUT is an outline application, so only the access is fixed now. Layout, scale and appearance come back in a later reserved matters application. The officer report records that it includes:
- up to 38 homes on two fields, with a developable area of about 1.1 hectares
- demolition of the buildings on site, including a former petrol filling station and the house at 36 Mill Street
- about 0.61 hectares of public open space
- four car parking spaces for Harbury Health Centre, which borders the site
- sustainable drainage and landscaping
The applicants are Rainier Developments Limited, the Turner family and the Heart of England Co-operative Society. Most of the site is outside Harbury’s built-up area boundary, and part of it sits within or beside the conservation area.
Who objected, and why
The committee heard the application because both the ward member and Harbury Parish Council objected. The report lists 44 letters of objection, including one from the Harbury Society and one from Warwickshire Wildlife Trust, and six neutral comments.
Councillor Susan Ostrander, the ward member, set out eight grounds in writing. They include conflict with the Harbury Neighbourhood Development Plan, harm to a protected view from Mill Street, parking and road safety, drainage on land she described as waterlogged in winter, and pressure on the surgery and the primary school.
At the meeting Councillor Ostrander put the application in a wider context, telling councillors that 685 homes are potentially in play around Harbury: 145 at Bush Heath Lane, 150 off Butt Lane, 230 at the Harbury depot, 122 on two sites in the emerging South Warwickshire Local Plan, and the 38 before them, and that the ward’s population grew by 15% between 2011 and 2021 and by a further 24% between 2021 and 2024. That is from the meeting webcast.
The parish council’s speaker made three points: that the council had wrongly given its own local plan policies “very limited weight”, that the landscape harm which officers themselves rated as moderate to significant should have been decisive, and that a planning inspector at Kings Langley had refused a scheme on design grounds in September despite a land supply shortfall there.
Two of the council’s own consultees objected too. Warwickshire County Council’s rights of way team objected, and the district’s landscape officer objected to the landscape and visual assessment.
The school cannot take the children
The most concrete problem in the papers is Harbury Primary School. Warwickshire County Council, as education authority, told the district that the school cannot absorb the extra pupils and cannot be expanded. The report puts the likely yield at 12 primary-age children.
The answer in the Section 106 agreement is money, including a contribution towards transporting pupils out of the village:
| Contribution | Amount |
|---|---|
| Education, in total | £657,716 |
| of which early years | £91,148 |
| of which primary | £273,444 |
| of which secondary | £180,288 |
| of which post-16 | £45,072 |
| of which primary and secondary SEN | £67,764 |
| Home to school transport | £78,960 |
| NHS South Warwickshire University Foundation Trust | £68,564 |
| Libraries | £832 |
| Rights of way maintenance | £1,647.45 |
| Road safety | £1,900 |
All figures are from the officer report’s Section 106 heads of terms.
The scheme also has to provide 35% affordable housing, which the report says means up to 13 homes. Of those, up to 60% can be social rent, with a maximum of 20% affordable rent and 20% intermediate housing.
Biodiversity is another shortfall. The report says the site cannot achieve the required 10% net gain within its boundary, with a deficit of 2.45 habitat units, so the developer will buy off-site units to make up the difference.
How the vote went
Councillor Anne Parry proposed the grant, after listening to “some very strong” cases from the parish council and the ward member, on the basis that the housing land supply position left no “material planning reason to refuse”. Councillor Neil Edden, the vice chair, seconded, saying there was no way to refuse “despite what I might think”.
Councillor Kate Rolfe spoke against, saying the site was outside the built-up area boundary and that children should not be sent to school by bus “if there is a bus once an hour to somewhere else”.
Councillors Alan Scorer and Bill Fleming both said they would go along with the officer recommendation reluctantly. Councillor Fleming, who lives in Bidford, said that village was already busing 40 children a day to other primary schools because its own was full.
The chair, Councillor Stuart Keighley, took the vote on a show of hands and declared the application granted. The numbers for and against were not read out. Permission is subject to the Section 106 agreement being signed, so the formal decision notice will follow.
One update reached the committee on the night. The council’s update sheet said the district can now show 2.43 years of housing land, not the 2.21 years quoted in the report, and that the change had “no material effect on the planning balance”.
Two other decisions the same night
Three houses on a Green Belt plot at Tanworth-in-Arden. Application 26/00410/FUL replaces one house, Ravenstone on Well Lane, with three. The site is in the Green Belt and the Arden Special Landscape Area, and the committee heard it because the parish council and ward member objected, alongside 19 objection letters. Outline permission for two houses on the plot was granted in December 2025. The committee granted it with nobody voting against, on a proposal from Councillor Edden seconded by Councillor Parry. Tanworth-in-Arden is about 12 miles north-west of Stratford.
A replacement farm building at Admington. Application 26/00581/FUL, for land beside Willow Brook House, was called in by Admington Parish Council and drew six objections. Councillor Louis Adam proposed the grant, seconded by Councillor Fleming. One member said they would vote against because they doubted the agricultural case for a barn of that size on 1.9 acres. The committee granted it, and asked officers to word the conditions so that the existing buildings and two shipping containers on the site are removed. Admington is about eight miles south of Stratford, near Ilmington.
What it means for you
- In Harbury: the layout, house types and appearance are not yet decided. They come back as a reserved matters application, and that is the stage at which the open space, the views from Mill Street and the health centre parking will be fixed. Objections at that stage can only be about those details, not the principle of building.
- If you have a child due to start school: the county’s position is that Harbury Primary cannot expand. The £78,960 transport contribution exists because some children from the new homes may be sent to schools elsewhere.
- Across the district: this is the pattern until the South Warwickshire Local Plan is adopted, expected in early 2028. Villages with a neighbourhood plan are finding that it carries less weight than the land supply shortfall.
Our planning news page follows the Planning Committee’s decisions. The next meeting is on Wednesday 21 October at 6pm, and the agenda is due in the week before.
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