River
84 homes approved at Carmarthen West, NRW still to sign off the Tywi
Half the houses would be affordable. Sewage would go to a works that is already missing a performance standard. The river that takes the outflow is the same Tywi NRW says could lose its salmon by 2030.
Carmarthenshire planning committee has approved 84 houses and flats on a field off Ffordd Pendre, west of town and north of the A40, on the Carmarthen West strategic site. The vote is not the last word. Consent sits behind a revised assessment of effects on the River Tywi and the Carmarthen Bay special areas of conservation. Natural Resources Wales has to authorise that assessment before anyone can treat the estate as a done deal.
The applicant is Lovell Partnerships. The council, not the builder, will submit the revised river assessment, as the law requires. Lovell would also pay the authority £458,178 toward a link road already built and toward a new primary school on the wider site.
The 84 homes run from one bed to four bed. Twenty five would be social rent, 17 low cost ownership, the rest open market. That is half the scheme in some form of affordable housing. Access would be off a roundabout on Ffordd Pendre. Planning officer John Thomas told members the layout was low density, with a landscaped area and hedgerows kept.
Heat pumps, soakaways and a failing works
The design papers say every house would have an air source heat pump and a system that takes heat back from shower water. Electric vehicle charging is proposed on the plots. Solar panels would go on the social rent roofs. More than a quarter of the eight acre field would stay as open space, play areas, paths, new planting and surface water soakaways. New hedges and 155 trees are on the drawings. The scheme lists 157 car spaces and 235 bike spaces.
Surface water would go to a basin and a soakaway on the site. Foul drainage is the sharper problem. Sewage would run to the network that feeds Welsh Water’s Parc y Splott wastewater treatment works off Llansteffan Road. A committee report said that works is failing to comply with a wastewater performance standard. To offset the extra load from the new houses, surface water is to be taken out of a combined public sewer on council land at St Mary’s Primary School.
That is the official mitigation. Whether it is enough for the estuary is the question NRW still holds.
A thousand homes behind one field
Ffordd Pendre is not a one off estate in open country. It sits inside Carmarthen West, the allocation for around 1,100 homes, a primary school, employment land and recreation space. Some of that housing is already up. The new school is still a line on a plan. Councillor Russell Sparks, who also sits as mayor of Carmarthen, told the committee the houses were needed and the affordable share was welcome. He also said he was “slightly concerned” about the Tywi, given NRW’s warning that salmon could be extinct in some Welsh rivers by 2030.
Sparks has used stronger language elsewhere this year. In June the Carmarthen River Festival was called off. The mayor, who holds the old title Admiral of the Port of Carmarthen, said the evidence was clear that the river was dying and that salmon and sewin could be gone by the date NRW has put on the record. Citizen tests run with Achub y Tywi and the Carmarthen Coracle and Netsmen’s Association have shown phosphate, nitrate and ammonia sitting high. One mid May reading hit 2.50 mg/L of phosphate, the top of the kit.
NRW said in the week of the committee that it had a number of ongoing enforcement and compliance investigations in the Tywi catchment.
The wider hold on west Wales housing
This is not only a Carmarthen argument. Since last winter NRW has required new schemes that drain toward marine special areas of conservation to prove they will not add to nutrient pollution. Housing bodies told the BBC that left around 11,000 homes stalled across west Wales, including more than 2,000 affordable units. Carmarthen Bay is one of those protected waters. The Burry Inlet, on the Llanelli side of the county, is another.
So the committee has done what planning committees do when a site is allocated and half the units are affordable: it has said yes, with a condition that the regulator must still be satisfied about the river. That condition is the story. If NRW will not sign the assessment, the 84 homes stay on paper. If it does, Carmarthen West takes another step toward the 1,100, and the Tywi takes another increment of treated effluent from Parc y Splott.
The Chronicle will report the NRW decision when it comes, and what it means for the rest of the strategic site and for the coracle men still working the same water.