Plans for student flats in Bedminster have been approved despite their distance from Bristol’s university buildings. Developers now have planning permission to build a 49-bed block of student flats at the bottom of West Street, knocking down an old car workshop.
The three-storey building would be located in an area largely home to families, more than a 30-minute walk from any of the closest university campuses. Planning officers at Bristol City Council said several bus stops are nearby, and students could rely on the bus.
Councillors on the development control A committee granted permission for the scheme on Wednesday, December 21. Property developers behind the scheme claimed building flats would take pressure off family homes getting converted into student shared houses.
Read more: Decision delayed on student flats in Bedminster far away from universities
Developer David Fitter said: “These plans to provide student accommodation will rejuvenate West Street with a beautiful building and bring footfall to local businesses. Landlords are already converting traditional family homes into student HMOs to meet demand. Developments such as this will give Bristol planning the opportunity to reject HMO conversions, and help safeguard against future loss of traditional housing stock in the area.”
The student flats would be built from numbers 155 to 165 on West Street, by Paragon Developments. Car dealership Paramount Cars, founded in 1976, would be demolished. The dealership’s owner recently sold the site to the developers and retired.
The committee was split on whether new student flats should be built in this part of Bedminster, with some calling for developers to build more family homes instead, and others saying it was good to “disperse student accommodation across the city”.
Councillor Tom Hathway said: “There’s clearly a problem with endless university expansion and it tickles me when developers come to us and say ‘we’re building student accommodation to help with the housing crisis'. The housing crisis we’ve got is that there aren’t enough family and affordable homes.
“If you want to help, build family and affordable homes, don’t build student accommodation. But obviously we don’t have the policies that can deal with that at the moment. I think it’s OK, it’s average. Given we’re quite limited in policy terms, I think I will have to vote for this.”
Supporting the plans, Councillor Ed Plowden said: “There’s clear evidence that a lack of student accommodation can affect housing availability across the city, so this is therefore justified. It’s good that we’re not having an over-concentration of student accommodation in certain areas, and dispersing it across the city is quite a good thing.”
The scheme was previously considered by the committee on Wednesday, November 16, who then voted to defer making a decision. Chair of the committee Cllr Richard Eddy previously said he was sceptical about student accommodation expanding this far out, but had now been “more mollified” by extra information from the developers and planning officers.
