A bid to build four large houses in a Herefordshire village has been rejected, two and a half years after being put forward.

The application for outline permission to build the four-bedroom homes on an acre of vacant land beside the Old School House, Marden, north of Hereford, and for access onto the main road through the village, was submitted in May 2019.

The refusal notice said it lay outside the village’s settlement boundary, set out in the Marden neighbourhood development plan.

As the area has already exceeded its housing growth target, “there is no justification for allowing further market housing outside of the defined settlement boundary”, the notice said – adding that approval “would lead to the promotion of unsustainable patterns of development”.

The parish council had also objected on these grounds, and had claimed that “smaller houses are required in the parish rather than more four-bed houses”.

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The application had said that while the site was not with the settlement boundary, it was right next to it, and was “an anomalous gap in an otherwise continuous run of dwellings”.

The bid also fell foul of the planning requirement not to add to runoff entering the rivers Wye and Lugg Special Area of Conservation (SAC), the notice said.

Developments in the catchment of the SAC require a Habitat Regulations Assessment, “to establish beyond all reasonable scientific doubt, that there would not be any adverse effect on its integrity”. And the application had failed to demonstrate this, the application said.

The river Lugg sub-catchment already suffers from phosphate levels which “exceed conservation objectives”, it noted.

The notice also said the proposed drainage mound to deal with sewage from the houses “would increase the risk of foul water flooding, increasing the risk of pollution as a result”.

It further rejected the ecological appraisal and bat roost assessment submitted with the application, as being “valid only for works commencing within 12 months” and therefore “now not current and valid”.

These issues with the proposal “are so fundamental that it has not been possible to negotiate a satisfactory way forward”, the notice concluded.

A previous bid by the same applicant to develop the site was rejected in 2016 over visual, ecological and road safety concerns.