A CONTROVERSIAL scheme designed to make rapid and significant in-roads into a lengthy waiting list for council houses has been approved, despite concerns it will damage the environment and leave its residents marooned in an area lacking public facilities.

A majority of Darlington Borough Council’s planning committee voted for the authority’s joint venture with developer Esh Homes to build 450 council houses, affordable homes and market value homes near the A66 off Neasham Road.

Councillors were told the scheme was outside the council’s agreed limit for development, but that it had been identified by the authority as a suitable place for housing in its forthcoming Local Plan.

However, the meeting heard there was an urgent need for council and affordable housing in the borough, with 1,600 people on the authority’s waiting list.

The authority’s head of planning David Coates said the scheme would not solve the issue, but would markedly cut the waiting list.

While numerous concerns had been raised over the ecological impact of the scheme and the reduction of green space in the area, Mr Coates said the proposal demonstrated the council’s “exemplar approach to ecology and green issues”, and although studies had identified the development would have a neutral effect on the area’s ecology.

He said the scheme had been “squeezed to the pips” to ensure measures being introduced would ensure significant improvements to the borough’s environment.

However, the meeting heard objectors wanted brownfield sites in the borough to be developed instead, opposed the removal of 64 trees and had insisted the area’s wildlife would be irreversibly damaged.

In addition, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England pointed out that the borough had a sufficient number of property plans approved to meet its five-year housing supply requirement and said the scheme would consign 450 families to living on an estate lacking community infrastructure.

Eastbourne councillor Steven Tait said: “There’s no services, there’s nothing for them to do. All these people will have to travel to different destinations just to do something.”

He added the area already suffered from noise issues related to the Northern Echo Arena and that it could be exacerbated with more residents in the area, but officers said schemes could be introduced to manage noise.

Councillor Eddie Heslop said the demarcation of the council housing in brick and private housing in stone on the estate could create “problems of division”. He said: “It’s not integrating anybody.”

Councillor Lorraine Tostevin, who represents the nearby Hurworth ward, said even though the council was intending the development would produce a net ecological gain, by introducing improvements elsewhere in the borough, it did not negate what was happening to mature trees and hedges at the Neasham Road site.

She said: “Within conversations in Hurworth it has always been made very clear that there was a plan and there would be no further development outside what had been allowed for in the Local Plan. There is another big site due to be presented in Hurworth and the key reason we have been told that will not be approved is that it is outside development limits.

“And here we are again approving a private site that is outside the development limits. I can accept to some degree that there is an attachment to the need for council houses, but it is quite difficult to equate that in everybody’s minds.”