Woodhouses Village planning dispute due to receive final decision
Reporter: Charlotte Hall, Local Democracy Reporter
Date published: 24 March 2025
An image from the planning meeting about development of 41 new homes at Ashton Road in Woodhouses
A planning dispute that has left some in a village feeling ‘frustrated and powerless’ will come to an end this week.
A final decision on the plan will be made on Wednesday (March 26).
Councillors will decide whether to approve plans to contruct more than 40 new homes on Ashton Road in Woodhouses.
Developers Jones Homes plan to build the 41 new homes and a new road on a plot of greenfield land behind the village church.
The plans include six three-bedroom and 35 four-bedroom properties. Four of the homes will be ‘gifted’ to a social housing provider.
A water pump station would also be built on an adjacent plot of green belt land to supply the homes.
Councillors unanimously voted to defer a decision on the development at a two-hour planning meeting in January due to major concerns by villagers the new homes would add to an already ‘dangerous’ traffic problem on Ashton Road.
They hoped an agreement could be reached between villagers and the developer.
Officers recommended the development for approval, noting that the council had little substantial planning grounds to refuse the development.
Jones have also indicated the developer would appeal the decision and ‘seek a claim for costs’ if their application is refused, ‘on the basis of the decision being unrelated to planning matters’.
The application received 119 objections and a petition signed by more than 200 residents.
Residents who spoke to the Local Democracy Reporting Service claimed there were ‘crashes all the time’ on Ashton Road, which is used as a ‘rat run for people cutting through into Manchester’.
“At peak times, that quadruples the amount of traffic through the village,” resident Paul Robbie told the LDRS after the meeting.
Paul and his wife’s cars have been ‘smashed into five times’ causing hundreds of pounds worth of damage, according to the couple.
Their worry is that the new development will exacerbate the issue, as the new households could have between one and four vehicles each.
But council officers claim the impact of additional road traffic would ‘not be significant’, with a maximum of 33 vehicles would be expected to use the access point at peak times.
They also noted that only two ‘severe’ accidents – in which drivers were injured or killed – had been recorded on the road.
At the time, villagers who attended the meeting loudly opposed these assertions.
A final decision is due to be made on Wednesday at 6pm at Oldham’s Civic Centre.
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