Bellway has submitted plans for up to 170 homes on a 23 acre site south of Mill Lane at Brayton, near Selby. As Place Yorkshire reported, the application covers the site immediately south of the village.
The density question
A hundred and seventy homes on 23 acres works out at roughly seven and a half homes per acre, which is low-density suburban development: detached and semi-detached houses with gardens, estate roads, verges.
That is what the market in a village like Brayton expects and what will sell. It is also, from a land use perspective, an inefficient way to house people, and it is the pattern that has consumed enormous amounts of countryside around Northern towns over the past forty years.
There is no villain in that. It is what buyers want, what builders can finance and what planning policy has historically encouraged. It is worth noticing, though, that the same 170 homes at the density being built at Bury Interchange or Weir Mill in Stockport would occupy a fraction of the land and sit within walking distance of a station.
Selby’s position
Selby is a market town in North Yorkshire with reasonable rail connections to Leeds, York and Hull, and it has absorbed significant housing growth as a commuter location. Brayton sits immediately south west of the town.
The district’s economy has been shaped heavily by Drax, a few miles away, which we covered earlier this month when the Environment Agency granted the permit variation allowing carbon capture at the Selby plant. Whether that project proceeds to a final investment decision matters considerably more to Selby’s long-term employment base than any housing application.
The infrastructure question
The published detail does not include the affordable proportion, the tenure mix or the contributions package, and those are the things worth pressing on.
The standard objection to a scheme of this size on a village edge is capacity: schools, GP lists and roads. It is frequently dismissed as resistance to change, and frequently it is a real problem. A hundred and seventy households is perhaps 400 to 500 people arriving in a village, and whether the primary school and the surgery can absorb that is a question with a factual answer that should be established before approval rather than argued about afterwards.
The wider Yorkshire picture
This lands in the same week as 340 homes recommended for approval in Barnsley and 100 approved at Wilsden in Bradford. That is over 600 homes moving through the Yorkshire planning system in a single week, on top of the £700m allocated to West and South Yorkshire under the social homes programme.
The supply side is genuinely moving. The question that keeps returning, across almost every scheme we cover, is what proportion of it will be affordable to the people who need it most.
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