Official complaint lodged over Shrewsbury housing estate contractors
The construction of a new housing estate in Shrewsbury has led to an official complaint being lodged with Shropshire Council over dirt, traffic and noise.
Residents living next to the Taylor Wimpey and Persimmon Homes Weir Hill Gardens/Lily Hay building development have filed an official complaint to the council for alleged breach of planning conditions, which, if enforced, could see the nationwide developers fined.
The housebuilding giants, two of the largest in the UK, started work on their 600-plus homes development in March 2019. Despite producing a legally binding construction and environment management plan (CEMP) as part of the planning approval, the local residents’ group, Weir Hill Action Group (WHAG) claim it is broken on an almost daily basis.
Malcolm Bird, WHAG chair, said: “The CEMP aims to protect the health, safety, amenity and wellbeing of the residents. Despite the developers having made numerous promises at meetings with us and Shropshire Council to improve, the situation remains unchanged, leaving the residents with no choice but to launch complaint proceedings.”
Disgruntled
Residents says their lives have been blighted by hazardous muddy roads, near-miss accidents, and, during drier weather, dust clouds have left their homes and property covered in high-risk clay dust. They add that construction traffic has regularly breached school zone times when roads are meant to be free of HGVs, in order to keep residents’ children safe as they go to and from school.
Local resident and WHAG member, Yvonne Aust, said: “Disgruntled and disappointed by the numerous CEMP contraventions, residents started an incident log. More than 300 incidents have been logged over the last eight months, but we are sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg and that many more violations have occurred.”
Ian Kilby, Shropshire Council’s head of planning services, said: “I confirm that we have received a planning enforcement query last week about construction impacts associated with the Weir Hill development.
“This will be allocated to an officer and investigated in accordance with the council’s planning enforcement protocol.”
