Swaffham factory to make way for care home?
BRECKLAND planners are being recommended to approve plans to build a residential care home on Swaffham signmakers' IRS's site in Castleacre Road.
The firm, which has been in Swaffham since 1964, intends to move across the road to a new factory on a bigger site in Turbine Way on the EcoTech Business Park.
London-based Bethel Investments wants to demolish the present IRS factory and build a two-storey, H-shaped residential care home for up to 60 elderly and infirm people in its place. All the rooms would be en-suite and there would be communal activity rooms and kitchens on each floor.
A report to Monday's Breckland development control committee recommends go-ahead is given for the plan, subject to certain conditions, as it would "optimise the use of the land available and provide for much-needed sheltered housing accommodation" in the town.
After negotiations with the developer, the amended design and layout of the new home is said to be acceptable and includes suitable access and parking arrangements.
But Bethel Investments would need to provide footway improvements to the north and south of the site to link in with existing paths because of the substantial extra pedestrian, vehicle and cycle movements the care home would create.
"The applicant has agreed to fund and implement such off-site highway improvement," it points out.
Concerns were raised by one neighbour about being overlooked by the care home.
But the report says the new building would "not unacceptably overlook or be overlooked by neighbouring properties and neither would it unacceptably overshadow or be overshadowed".
A noise survey is needed because the care home would be close to several potentially noisy commercial premises. But its findings are not expected to throw up any major hurdles and could help determine the positioning of bedrooms within the building and the type of windows used, it says.
All the trees and hedges around the site would remain and form part of a landscaping scheme. And as there has been a factory and metal works there, checks for any contamination would be needed as a precautionary measure.
IRS chairman Ian Dupont said the firm had its biggest turnover last year and rather than spend money on its old factory would prefer to build a new one, with modern insulation, on a bigger site.
"Breckland have been very helpful and we are looking forward to making the move," he said. I would like to think within a year we could be on the new site."
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