Bevendean student flats for Willow House site stuck in limbo

The plot on the corner of Heath Hill Avenue and Auckland Drive, in Bevendean, formerly the Willow House surgery, looks like remaining vacant for the immediate future.

Heath Hill Student Developments asked Brighton and Hove City Council to relax two of the conditions attached to an existing planning permission to build a block of 24 student bedrooms.

But the council’s Planning Committee voted against the proposal at a virtual meeting on Wednesday, blocking progress on the site for the time being.

The company asked the council to drop the requirement to include a surgery in the new building.

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It also asked for a less restrictive condition to govern who will manage the student flats and who can live in them.

The current condition requires the owner to enter an agreement with either Brighton University or Sussex University.

But both are building thousands of student bedrooms of their own and said that they would not be prepared to take on management of the block.

Neighbours are understood to back the case for proper management after a number of parties in the area, most notably when police were called to nearby Norwich Drive last Halloween.

Protests outside Willow House surgery shortly before it closed

Labour councillor Daniel Yates, who represents Moulsecoomb and Bevendean ward, opposed the application.

He said that the local community had “very strong feelings” about the succession of planning applications to build student flats on the site.

It was identified as a potential site for housing in 2014 but that changed after planning permission was granted on appeal for student flats.

The offer to replace the existing doctors’ surgery helped to sway the planning inspector, giving “significant weight” to the plans at appeal.

Since then, the Brighton and Hove Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) has said that there were no plans to fund a GP surgery in the area.

The CCG intends to move two other surgeries into a new health centre when the Preston Barracks project in Lewes Road, Brighton, is completed.

And Councillor Yates said that the developer appeared to be proving that student housing was not required, to judge by the response of the two universities.

The council’s planning policies now permit other educational institutions – besides the universities – to manage student blocks but the owner did not appear to have approached them.

How Willow House looked before it was demolished

Councillor Yates said that, when it came to the doctors’ surgery, he could understand the NHS position.

But he said: “The people of Bevendean have lost their GP surgery completely. They are under threat of losing their next local GP surgery and having it moved to where I live, at the far end of the ward, two bus journeys away.

“They haven’t had a chance to vocalise the anger that they feel about the continued messing about over this site.”

He said that people in the area were losing out and councillors should not “soften” the requirements.

Councillor Yates said that the owner could come back with a different scheme that included housing for people in the area.

Green councillor Sue Shanks said that it was unlikely to happen because the proposed block was near the two universities even though neither would take it on.

She said: “At the time, there were a lot of complaints about the loss of that surgery. Certainly, a lot of residents would welcome another surgery.”

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Councillor Shanks said that it was irrelevant whether the CCG wanted a surgery at the site.

Previous Planning Committee meetings were told that, in planning terms, a surgery could include a dentist or another type of clinic.

The committee voted six to two to reject the developer’s request to relax the planning conditions.

In addition, Labour councillor Chris Henry abstained and Conservative councillor Carol Theobald was unable to vote because of technical problems.