Residents Launch Legal Fight Against Care Home Plans

A coalition of local residents has launched a public legal defence fund to challenge West Berkshire Council's decision to approve an 87-bed care home on the former Hitachi HQ site on Kiln Road in Newbury.

The western area planning committee approved the scheme during a marathon final session. Residents say committee fatigue and pressure to clear outstanding files caused a catastrophic failure in public law decision-making, and they are preparing to take the case to the High Court.

The council says urban areas, including Newbury, will be the prime focus for housing and economic development, with suitable previously developed sites earmarked for redevelopment.

Residents point to what they call glaring double standards. Councillors refused retrospective permission for a padel court at The Retreat at Elcot Park hotel at the same meeting because of noise.

"The double standards are absolutely staggering," says residents' representative Catherine Morse.

"The council ruthlessly applied residential amenity policies to block a tennis court conversion and a single-window domestic extension, yet completely threw the rulebook out the window for a multi-million-pound corporate care home development."

"They actively protected one window on a housing estate while abandoning an entire neighbourhood pocket on Kiln Road."

The legal brief says the committee majority was won on a major material error of fact. Ms Morse says the council assessed the three-storey care home as being masked by a uniform three-metre topographical dip, when the land actually rises across the site and the dip is two metres or less. "As a result, the massive building will stand a full metre higher in the sky, completely invalidating the council's privacy and visual dominance calculations under Local Policy DM30," she adds. Campaigners also highlight missing engineering specs for a key boundary wall and a traffic model that compared a 24/7 care institution with a standard 9-to-5 corporate office.

Campaigners warn the case could set a worrying precedent as West Berkshire moves to a more centralised planning system with more officer-made decisions. "If an unverified baseline, missing structural checks, and blatant double standards can slide through the council's final hour, it raises terrifying questions about how everyday people's objections will be handled in the new, less transparent planning landscape," adds Miss Morse.

"If we don't fight for accountability now, no neighbourhood in Newbury is safe."

Residents also point to environmental risk: the site sits close to the River Lambourn, a protected Site of Special Scientific Interest and rare chalk stream, and they warn of potential toxic construction run-off, silt pollution and wider environmental harm.

Niki Hinman, Local Democracy Reporter