13 Jun 2025
Has a major blow been dealt to plans for new homes to the north of St Albans?
Two major developments totalling 1,150 homes are planned for agricultural land behind the Texaco garage on the Harpenden Road and stretching all the way to the railway line. The area is owned by a number of different groups – including St Albans School – and is an area of high quality agricultural land, containing a principal chalk aquifer and wildflower meadows.
The second of these is owned by Cala Homes, and concerns providing a residential development of 150 homes to the rear of 112-156B Harpenden Road.
Housebuilding on this site will be taking place either side of a flood flow path – the route water takes overland when drainage systems are overwhelmed – with the developer
installing a water pumping station to tackle any potential problems with flooding.
This means flood water will be pumped into the sewer system, potentially causing overflow into our rare chalk streams and causing catastrophic environmental damage, and also risking neighbouring properties.
Local campaign group CLASH have also highlighted the consequences to neighbouring properties should the pumping station break down, and claim Cala are ignoring the importance of the flood flow path.
Now Herts county council’s flood risk management team has said that a larger swale – a sustainable drainage system for managing water run-off – needs to be installed at the site access point to prevent a higher flood risk.
But a larger swale will reduce the access, meaning there is not enough space for a road, pavement and cycle lane as required under the planning conditions for the development.
Gee Smedley, spokesperson for CLASH and the Save North St Albans Green Belt campaign, said: “All the way through this and previous application processes, we have simply aimed for the planning decisions to made on planning policy and not left to judgements which can side-step the requirements of sustainability in development.
“It still concerns us that Cala are pushing ahead and seem to have no answers for the failures of the application so far. Why would the investor of Cala allow them to continue to waste resources on a site that cannot deliver development in line with national planning policy?
“This was a failed site from the start. Why the land was bought at a high value with delivery risks and seemingly no clawback provision are questions the board and governance teams at Cala have to ask of their business.”
If the application is not withdrawn, it will again come to the SADC planning committee where councillors will be left to make the final decision.
However, no date has yet been scheduled for the application to return to committee.
