MARY ROBINSON MP

28.8.20 OA20 Woodford (Stockport)

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The Woodford Opportunity Area comprises a gross area of some 238 hectares located close to the southern boundary of Stockport and Greater Manchester with Cheshire East. The scheme will seek to build on the success of the Woodford Garden Village development through the delivery of further high quality sensitive residential led development and local facilities. In total the scheme will deliver around 2,400 new homes.

 

The development of the area will need to:

1. Provide a range of housing including a range of sizes and tenures to meet defined local need.

2. Provide a significant proportion of housing for older people.

3. Deliver a suitable proportion of affordable housing across the site, phased to ensure that both market and affordable housing can be delivered at similar times within the development of the site.

4. Incorporate land to enable self-build plots to meet identified local demand and needs.

5. Be designed in order to minimise any adverse impacts on the Green Belt beyond the site, including through the use of significant landscaping, and ensure a reasonable buffer of land to be retained as Green Belt between new development and other existing/planned settlements.

6. Deliver or provide significant financial contributions towards significant improvements in the accessibility of the site by cycle, walking and by bus as well as to highway infrastructure. This shall include the provision of additional bus services serving Stockport, other key local destinations and rail stations to allow onward travel as well as a rapid service to Manchester Airport.

7. Incorporate a high standard of design across the full dwelling range, delivering a range of densities across the site. 8. Incorporate high levels of landscaping treatment with substantial areas of green and blue infrastructure.

9. Incorporate measures to ensure that the rate of runoff of surface water from the land is not increased and, ideally, is decreased.

10. Safeguard any protected species, including the retention of all existing ponds within the site where practicable.

11. Sensitively integrate the development with areas of priority habitat including the retention of existing deciduous woodland.

12. Retain, protect and where possible enhance all heritage assets within the site, as well as their settings, and ensure that the development sensitively integrates with the existing residential areas of Woodford.

13. Provide financial contributions to the necessary provision of education and health facilities and other infrastructure etc. as dictated by other policies in the development plan (in addition to the facilities and infrastructure being delivered by the redevelopment of the former BAE systems site.

 

Reasoned Justification

The development of this land will be attractive to the housing market. The site is well located with good connectivity to the A34 and, from 2017, improved connectivity to the Airport and the M56 to the west and the A6 to the east arising from the opening of the A6-Manchester Airport Relief Road (A6-MARR). As well as providing opportunities to deliver a wide range of housing types, the site also offers an attractive opportunity to deliver high value housing benefitting from an established high value housing market.

 

The nature of the area and its relationship with the existing village of Woodford will allow for a range of densities to be delivered, with opportunities for higher densities to be delivered within the centre of the village and where lower densities can be delivered to the south of the site thus reducing the impact of the development on the wider, retained Green Belt.

 

The development of over 2,000 dwellings on greenfield, former Green Belt land will mean that the delivery of a range of affordable housing can be provided, to further increase the range of housing types and tenures in this part of Stockport.

In turn this will help to meet the identified need which exists in Stockport and across the wider conurbation. Local demand for self-build plots may be identified through the Council’s self-build register and development in this area will need to contribute towards meeting the identified self-build need

Good design will be critical to the success of any new development in this area and that will include the incorporation of green and blue infrastructure.

 

The provision of significantly improved public transport and highway infrastructure are prerequisites for the site’s delivery and will be required in order to enable the use of more sustainable modes of transport whilst mitigating the impact of additional vehicular traffic. The transport infrastructure to be provided or contributed to will be informed through the refresh of the South East Manchester Multi-Modal Study currently being undertaken. New development of this scale will increase the pressure on, in particular, existing education and health provision in the locality and in order to address the impact of the development in that regard provision will need to be made to increase capacity.