BUILDING 10,000 new homes on the edge of Hereford is better than the alternatives, a senior figure in countryside protection has said.

Herefordshire Council expects the western bypass project to the city’s west to “create over 10,000 new homes and over 300 acres of new employment land”, and has committed to spending over £40m on the first, southern phase alone.

“It far better to concentrate new housing in one place, with the infrastructure already in place, than to just spread those 10,000 around the county,” says Andrew McRobb, director of countryside charity CPRE Herefordshire.

In other large recent developments such as in Ledbury, “there’s no infrastructure, no work for them locally, you can’t even walk or cycle to the shops”, he claimed.

Similarly, creating a new town near Pontrilas, in the southwest of the county, north of Abergavenny, would also be an alternative to “just building serries ranks of new houses”, he added.

And while CPRE originally opposed the western bypass plan, he personally favours it.

“I’m always getting stuck in traffic,” he said. “We must be the only city that has tractors and combines driving through it.”

But local transport campaigner Liz Morawiecka said that despite the cost of the bypass scheme at potentially over £350m, “I don’t know where the people in all those houses will work”.

A long-delayed planning application for 1,200 homes at Three Elms drew strong objections from Heineken and Avara, two of the county’s largest employers, over the scheme’s possible impact on water quality, she pointed out.

And the prospect of “people retiring here from southeast England” would put pressure on the county’s already strained care system, she claimed.

Mrs Morawiecka said much of the city congestion is down to the school run, given most parents feel cycling to school is unsafe – a problem which could be addressed cheaply.

But she agreed that the Pontrilas area was ripe for development given its local industry, rail and road links.