Plans to build student flats on the site of a demolished doctors’ surgery are in limbo after councillors rejected a request from the owner.
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 yesterday (Wednesday 10 February), 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.
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.
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 (general practice) 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.
