A RETIREMENT village will finally be built in Hereford after a four year-long planning battle.

The combined nursing and retirement home is set to create around 140 jobs when it is completed on land close to Widemarsh Common.

The go-ahead, given by Herefordshire Council’s planning committee in the past week, marks the end of a hard fought campaign by applicans Bovale.

The company saw its initial application refused in 2006.

An appeal was also dismissed.

The 200-bed complex, close to Sun Valley on Faraday Road, has been likened to the successful Rose Gardens residential complex in the Tupsley area which is currently oversubscribed.

Around 35 of the new units will fall within the “affordable”

bracket.

“We are delighted with this outline approval,” said Bovale’s managing director Charles Collier.

“It will offer an attractive alternative to traditional care options for those wishing to live in a supportive but unobtrusive community.”

He hopes work can begin as soon as possible.

Councillor Chris Chappell said the development would help brighten up the Widemarsh Common area which he described as dull.

Meanwhile, Coun Polly Andrews said she fully supported the idea but asked for a rethink on the lack of car parking spaces.

The complex will be built on the site of a former Sun Valley building devastated by a huge fire in 1992 which saw two county firefighters lose their life.

Patrick Downs, on behalf of Bovale, told the committee that “a great variety of jobs would be created” from care assistants to kitchen and domestic staff.

A stumbling block for the developers, and one of the reasons it was refused four years ago, was over worries about the smell coming from the adjacent Sun Valley, now Cargill Meats Europe, site.

But a planning report presented to councillors said they should work on the assumption that the “relevant pollution control regime will be properly applied and enforced”.

Another sticking point in the initial application had been over the land which is designated “employment land”.

However, Hereford City Council said this will be overcome by the development of the nearby Three Elms Trading Estate.