Case study / Worcestershire

Hopwood, refused three times, then won at appeal.

Thirty-four homes on Green Belt land, every one of them for social rent.

A terrace of three in the palette specified across the scheme: Cheshire and Worcester red multi brick with brick soldier sills and lintels, white windows and imitation slate grey tiles. A visualisation of the consented scheme, not a photograph. The homes are under construction for Bromford.

The facts

Green Belt affordable housing architects, Bromsgrove.

A two acre storage yard in the Green Belt, refused three times for market-led schemes, won at appeal for thirty-four homes at social rent, and now being built for a housing association.

The project

Thirty-four homes, no market units.

100%for social rent

Location: Redditch Road, Hopwood, Worcestershire
Client: A private landowning company; Bromford since 2025
Proposal: 34 affordable dwellings and a new access from the roundabout
Designation: Green Belt, outside the village envelope, previously developed
Our scope: Architect from concept, appeared at the appeal, then RIBA Stages 4 to 6 for Bromford
Status: Won at appeal 16 July 2024; under construction for Bromford

Application 22/01419/FUL and appeal APP/P1805/W/24/3339483 are on the public register.

The site

A storage yard that could store anything.

Two acres behind the houses on the southern edge of the village, surfaced in compacted hardcore and stacked with portable cabins. An Established Use Certificate confirmed the open storage of plant and machinery in 1985, and that use is completely unrestricted: any type of storage, any stacking height, any hour of the day.

The Green Belt test is about openness, and the inspector put it plainly: the site could not be considered as open in any realistic sense.

Area: About 0.89 hectares, 2.2 acres
Ground: Flood Zone 1, near level, 300mm of fall across the whole site
Edges: Rear gardens to the north and north east, a sports club field to the east, the A441 roundabout to the west, all inside tall established boundary planting

The sequence

Twenty-one months from application to consent.

October 2022: Full application made for 34 affordable dwellings
9 November 2023: Refused by the council on two grounds
8 April 2024: Resubmission refused at committee, against officer advice
25 June 2024: Hearing held, site visit the following day
8 July 2024: Unilateral Undertaking executed, all 34 homes socially rented
16 July 2024: Appeal allowed, subject to 18 conditions. Full costs awarded.

Planning journey: a full application for 34 affordable homes was made in October 2022; it was refused by the council in November 2023; an identical resubmission was refused at committee in April 2024; a hearing was held in June 2024; the scheme was allowed at appeal in July 2024; Bromford acquired the site in January 2025; and technical design and construction followed through 2025 and 2026.

Bromford acquired the land and announced it in January 2025.

Why it was allowed

The tenure was not a detail. It was the argument.

The Framework in force in 2024 put an affordable housing limb inside the Green Belt exception for previously developed land. A market-led scheme could not reach it. That is why three market schemes failed here and this one did not.

The exception

Significant harm, but not substantial.

Both sides agreed the site was previously developed and that the scheme was 100 per cent affordable meeting an identified and acute need. That left one question: whether 34 homes would cause substantial harm to openness. Substantial is a high bar, because the exception contemplates housing in the first place.

The finding was that harm to openness would be significant but not substantial, so the proposal met the exception and was not inappropriate development at all.

Retained: The tall boundary planting that already screens the site, reinforced with new planting
Cleared: The unrestricted open storage use, extinguished by the development

Decided under the Framework as it stood in July 2024. The Framework was replaced on 17 August 2026 and this exception now sits at policy GB7(1)(e), written differently. See the note at the end of the full story below.

The second reason for refusal

The council held the tenure against the scheme.

The refusal notice said the location was unsustainable, and that this was exacerbated by the tenure of the dwellings. In other words, that homes for social rent made the site worse.

The finding went the other way: socially rented residents were judged more likely to use the bus, and the scheme was held to support active and sustainable travel, not undermine it.

The obligation answered the point rather than arguing with it: additional peak time buses between Bromsgrove and Redditch, transport for school age children, whose designated high schools lie beyond the three mile walking distance, community transport for elderly and disabled residents, new crossings at Smedley Crooke Place and across the roundabout, and secure cycle storage for every home by condition.

The local highway authority raised no objection to the development at any stage.

The balance

No five year supply, and a policy out of step.

Two policy findings did the rest of the work. The council could not demonstrate a five year housing land supply, which engaged the tilted balance. And the district plan's Green Belt policy does not contain the Framework's previously developed land exception at all, so it was found inconsistent with the Framework and given reduced weight.

Against that, 34 affordable homes in an area where delivery had been, in the decision's own word, woeful.

Against: Conflict with the neighbourhood plan village envelope and with the district plan Green Belt policy
For: 34 affordable homes, re-use of previously developed land, support for existing community facilities, improved public transport and off site highway works

Even on a flat balance, the benefits were found to outweigh the policy conflicts.

The scheme

Thirty-eight homes to the hectare, inside a hedge.

Two short streets off a new access onto the existing roundabout, with the whole scheme held inside the boundary planting that already screened the yard, and an attenuation pond in the south east corner.

Approved site layout

The access is the roundabout, not the road.

The existing crossover onto Redditch Road is extinguished and a new access is taken directly off the roundabout, which is reconfigured to create a deflection that slows traffic on the southbound approach. The highway authority raised no objection, and the improvement was treated as a benefit of the scheme rather than a cost of it.

Drawing Ra_3298_S3_004 Rev F, one of seven Rickett Architects drawings on the approved list. The site boundary is the heavier line; the rest is survey context. Open it to read the layout.

Street elevation

Terraces and pairs, one ridge line at a time.

The variation is in the brick rather than the massing: two red multis used against each other.

Storeys: Two throughout, in blocks of three and four
Roofs: One pitch per block rather than a run of gables, which keeps the ridge line low against the boundary planting
Openings: Brick soldier courses to sills and lintels, white windows, recessed porches to the two and three bed houses

Section BB from drawing Ra_3298_s3_010, the planning submission street elevation. It is not one of the drawings listed on the decision, which lists the site plan and the five house types.

The specification

Schedule of accommodation

Seventeen three beds, thirteen two beds, four one beds.

Five house types across 34 homes. The one bed units are maisonettes in a single walk up block, two at ground floor and two above; everything else is a house, in semi detached pairs and short terraces.

Homes: 34
Typology: 30 houses and 4 maisonettes
Floor area: Approximately 2,574 sqm / 27,705 sqft gross internal across the 34
Site area: About 0.89 ha, 38 homes to the hectare
Parking: Two spaces per house, one per maisonette

The decision found no substantive evidence that a single tenure would fail to deliver a suitable mix.

Rickett Architects accommodation schedule, job 3298; floor areas approximate, to be confirmed against the delivered house types.

The mix

Every block on this diagram is affordable.

On a normal scheme this diagram is a large pale block of open market homes with a small solid block of affordable ones cut off below it. Here there is no pale block, and that absence is what the appeal turned on.

A proportional stack of the 34 homes by bedroom size: 17 three bed homes in the largest solid block, 13 two bed homes below it and 4 one bed maisonettes in the smallest block, the whole stack solid to show that all 34 are for social rent with no market units.

17Three bed housesSocial rent
13Two bed housesSocial rent
4One bed maisonettesSocial rent

Tenure: All 34, with an agreement in place with a local provider
Market units: None. No open market element to cross subsidise from.
Why it matters: The exception it was permitted under required a contribution to affordable need

All 34 homes are secured as socially rented units by the Unilateral Undertaking dated 8 July 2024.

Materials and boundaries

Two red multis, and a fence that has a job to do.

The palette is Cheshire red multi brick and Worcester red multi brick, each used as the contrasting detail on the other, with brick soldier sills and lintels, white windows and imitation slate grey roof tiles. A few plots take white render at first floor over a brick ground floor.

The boundaries do acoustic work as well as visual: beside a roundabout on an arterial road, the perimeter fences are 1800mm and 2500mm closeboard at 10 kilograms per square metre with no air gaps, with a noise mitigation scheme and a pre completion indoor test both required by condition.

The landscape does the Green Belt work: the tall planting that already screened the yard is retained and reinforced, three trees are kept with root protection to BS5837, and the south eastern corner takes grassland, wildflower meadow and shrubs, designed for the amphibians and reptiles recorded on and around the site as well as for surface water.

Materials plan Ra_3298_s3_006 and the schedule of conditions attached to the appeal decision.

The challenge

A site with a track record of saying no.

Three refusals before this one.

Twenty-one dwellings, then up to ten, then twenty-two. Each was a market-led scheme, and each ran into the same wall: inappropriate development in the Green Belt, with no very special circumstances put forward.

Discuss a Green Belt site

Visualisation of two of the consented homes at Redditch Road, Hopwood: red multi brick elevations with contrasting brick banding, brick soldier lintels above white windows, dark blue front doors under slim canopies, paved paths, clipped hedges and lawn to the frontage

So the answer was not a better market scheme. It was a different scheme entirely, designed from the start around the one exception the site could actually satisfy, and then argued at appeal on that basis.

The full story

Hopwood is washed over by the Green Belt and sits outside the village envelope in the Alvechurch Parish Neighbourhood Plan. On paper that is close to a dead end, and the site's own history said so: an outline scheme for 21 dwellings was refused and dismissed on appeal, an outline for up to ten was refused at committee, and a full application for 22 dwellings was refused in 2022. The one thing that survived from that last refusal was the access design, which the county highway authority had already accepted.

The Framework treats the construction of new buildings in the Green Belt as inappropriate, with exceptions. One of them covers the partial or complete redevelopment of previously developed land, and it splits into two limbs: either the development has no greater impact on openness than what is already there, or it causes no substantial harm to openness AND re-uses previously developed land AND contributes to meeting an identified affordable housing need in the area. A market scheme can only ever reach for the first limb, which on a two acre site with 20 or 30 houses is very hard to argue. The second limb was open, but only to a scheme that was genuinely affordable.

So the design started from the tenure rather than from a yield. Thirty-four homes, all of them for social rent, with an agreement already in place with a local provider and the whole lot secured by a Unilateral Undertaking rather than left to a later negotiation. The mix answers a family need directly: half the homes have three bedrooms. The layout keeps every dwelling inside the existing boundary planting, which was retained and reinforced rather than cleared, so the visual impact on openness is largely limited to the tops of the roofs and the view in through the new access.

The council refused it anyway, on Green Belt grounds and on the ground that the location was unsustainable, which the refusal notice said was exacerbated by the tenure of the dwellings. An identical resubmission went back and was refused again at committee in April 2024, against an officer recommendation to grant. We took it to appeal. It was heard over two days that June, with our director appearing for the appellant as its chartered architect, and the decision came on 16 July 2024: the appeal allowed, permission granted for 34 affordable houses, and a full award of costs made in our client's favour.

What the decision does not do is treat the affordable housing as a sweetener attached to a housing scheme. It treats it as the reason the scheme was capable of being permitted at all.

One caveat matters, because the rulebook has moved since. The Framework was replaced on 17 August 2026 and applies to decisions from that day, and the exception this appeal turned on now sits at policy GB7(1)(e). It reads more simply than the version in force in 2024: the redevelopment of previously developed land, including a material change of use to residential, which would not cause substantial harm to the openness of the Green Belt. The affordable housing limb has gone from it. On the same site today, the openness question would still be the question, but the tenure would no longer be the key that opens the exception.

The part that carries forward is the finding underneath it. A site that is permanently and unrestrictedly developed contributes very little to openness, whatever is standing on it at the moment somebody visits. That is the argument worth building a scheme around on any previously developed Green Belt site, and it is an evidence job rather than a drafting one: the established use certificate, the site conditions, the enclosure, and a layout that keeps the development inside what already screens it.

From consent to construction

The consent changed hands. The architect did not.

Bromford acquired the site and announced it six months after the decision, then appointed us to take our own consent through RIBA Stages 4, 5 and 6. We drew it, we made the case for it, and we are detailing it. Same drawings, a much harder set of questions.

Superstructure details

Fourteen drawings per house type, and this sheet behind all of them.

Everything follows from one step: the planning drawings are vetted before a single working drawing is started. Then house type packs of fourteen drawings each, block plan packs for the terraces, substructure and superstructure details, and site external works.

Drawing 14604-RIC-DR-A-0020, issued June 2025. Open it to read the annotations: this is the level the consent had to be taken to before anything could be built.

How the consent was taken on

The handover

Vet your own drawings first.

Inheriting a consent is normal work for us. Inheriting our own is unusual, and it does not make the vetting step optional: a planning drawing proves a scheme is acceptable, not that it can be built to a housing association's finishes specification, standard house type range and asset management view.

First: Vet the consented drawings for technical viability and regulatory compliance
Then: Reconcile them against the client's finishes specification and house type range
Then: Coordinate with the structural, drainage and highway engineers to one drawing set

The scope is specific about what only surfaces at Stage 4: room dimensions to finishes, movement joints block by block, rainwater pipes run to the shortest outlet, and boiler flues kept off the principal elevations.

None of it is visible on a planning drawing.

The house types

Two types the standard range could not cover.

Most of the consented house types were replaced by the client's own standard range at technical design, the efficient move for a provider that maintains what it builds. Two had no equivalent, which is the quiet argument for designing the awkward plots properly at planning stage.

Substituted: The three bed semi and most two bed pairs
Retained: The corner turning two bed pair, four plots, and the one bed walk up maisonette block, four homes
Why: The standard range carries neither a corner turner nor a walk up

Every replacement type was checked back against the approved drawings: the permission is granted by reference to a named list of plans.

Bromford drawing series 14604-RIC, issued from December 2024.

On site

Designing the conditions out, not just discharging them.

Eighteen conditions came with the decision, seven pre commencement: a newt method statement with a detection dog, tree protection, contamination, drainage and a phased highway timetable.

Where a condition could be closed by drawing rather than submission, it was: fire tracking is set out on the site plan itself, removing a separate discharge.

Stage 4 to 5: House type and block plan packs, details, from December 2024
Stage 5: Site issues answered as they arose, as built changes recorded
Stage 6: Conveyance and managed area plans, through 2025 and 2026

The site plan carries far more than plots: bin stores, electric vehicle charging, heat pump locations checked against gate swings, street lighting, the substation and hedgehog highways.

The homes are under construction for Bromford.