St George’s Barracks and Woolfox to be ‘drawn up’ for development under Rutland Local Plan

Masterplans for two previously rejected residential sites will be drawn up, in part to avoid ‘predatory developers’ building in unwanted areas.

The saga of Rutland’s local plan continued today (Tuesday, October 8). Even though it has yet to agree a draft version of the plan, Rutland County Council agreed to a partial review of the document, and to create blueprints for the redevelopment of St George's Barracks at North Luffenham, and RAF Woolfox near Greetham.

The authority started the local plan mess back in 2021, when councillors decided they didn't like several elements of the 2,000-home proposal and refused £29.4 million in Government infrastructure funding, making the scheme unviable.

This threw the whole local plan into chaos and so the authority, which was then run by a Conservative administration, decided to start it again from scratch.

A new draft plan is now nearly ready, and there will be a final public consultation this month, then a year-long examination period.

But a spanner has been thrown in the works by the Government’s review of housing targets, which is expected to double the number of homes needing to be built in Rutland over the next 20 years.

At the county council cabinet meeting today, cabinet member for planning Coun Paul Browne (Lib Dem - Oakham South) said the authority had to be ahead of any changes the Government may decide.

He said: “We have much to do as forward thinking, to address the potential scenarios. The possibility of becoming vulnerable to circulatory predator developers, as we were in 2021, has to be the foremost proposal in our minds. The feared potential outcome is we will end up with 3,500 to 4,000 [homes] in the lifespan of the plan.

“We have to have an appropriate plan-based approach to address the scale of such numbers. We have to do this in an orderly and process-led manner.”

He said any development on the Ministry of Defence land at St George’s Barracks and the now privately owned Woolfox site, ‘if they are to come about’, would realistically be towards the end of the plan period, which is the mid-2040s.

The draft plan going through is expected to be finalised in spring 2026 and the partial review will continue for at least 18 months after that.

The creation of the new local plan has cost the authority £2 million and the partial review will set it back a further estimated £695,000. The authority has identified funding for about two-thirds of that but will have a shortfall of about £281,000.

Leader of Rutland County Council, Gale Waller (Lib Dem - Normanton) said: “It is unfortunate that, having spent an awful lot of money and a lot of hard work getting our plan to regulation 19 stage, we are now, because of a change of government, faced with having to almost immediately partially review the process.

“There are costs associated with that, for which we are not being reimbursed by the Government. Money doesn't grow on trees and it means we are going to have to find it from somewhere in our very limited resources.”

The authority is having to make several millions of pounds of savings in the next few years to be sustainable.

The leader said it is not an easy situation for the council to be in. A cross-party local plan working group will continue.