The spine that lies East of Maghull, sort of

One of Sefton’s biggest housebuilding projects is back before councillors tonight and it all centres on a spine. Well, a spine road, to be more precise.

Planning officers are recommending approval for another change to the massive and somewhat controversial East of Maghull development, this time allowing Persimmon Homes and Countryside Partnerships to have another 100 homes occupied before a key section of a long-promised spine road is completed.

The recommendation will go before Sefton’s planning committee at Bootle Town Hall tonight and has attracted objections from Maghull Town Council, which argues the original infrastructure requirements should not continue to be weakened.

If you feel like you’ve heard about East of Maghull before, you’re probably right. One of the borough’s largest developments has become something of a long-running planning saga, with planning officers and councillors being asked repeatedly to revisit and allow amendments to different parts of the scheme as it has gradually taken shape. It’s a pretty complicated story, and tonight’s meeting is just the latest chapter.

The East of Maghull development was never meant to be just another housing estate. Sefton Council adopted a masterplan for it back in 2019, setting out a vision for a new community of more than 1400 homes (alongside a business park, local shopping facilities, green spaces and new transport links.) Although the land is split between different owners, the idea was that it would function as one coherent place.

At the heart of that vision was a spine road, designed to link Poverty Lane and School Lane and provide the transport backbone for the wider development.

Part of the complication is that East of Maghull is not one development being built by one company, far from it. The southern section is being developed by Persimmon Homes and Countryside Partnerships, while neighbouring land is being brought forward by the separate East Maghull Consortium, a partnership of landowners behind the northern part of the wider scheme.

According to the report, the southern developers have already delivered ‘the spine road from Poverty Lane to Whinny Brook, the whole flood relief channel and spine road connection over it, and a further 10m stretch of road into the northern site’. However, it says the remaining section between Whinny Brook and School Lane ‘has not been built’ and that its construction is ‘outside the control of the current applicants/developers’.

The issues over spine road rules did not start tonight. The original plans for this part of East of Maghull proved controversial and ended up being decided by the planning inspectorate after Sefton Council initially refused permission. One of the safeguards built into that decision was that no more than 250 homes would be occupied before the spine road was completed. The idea was fairly simply that the houses and the infrastructure were supposed to arrive together.

Since then, though, that limit has already been increased to nearly 500 homes. Tonight, councillors are being asked to raise it again to just shy of 600.

In a report produced ahead of the meeting, planning officers say they accept that the proposal conflicts with both the Sefton Local Plan and the Maghull Neighbourhood Plan, which require infrastructure to be delivered alongside development. But, they also point out that the council can no longer demonstrate a five-year housing land supply and that ‘significant weight must therefore be placed on the delivery of additional homes in the Borough’.

Maghull Town Council takes a different view. Its objections argue that changing the conditions again risks undermining the original masterplan and that the infrastructure promised should keep pace with the housing, not least to reduce impacts on existing residents and the local road network.

Councillors will now have to decide whether to stick to the original approach, with homes and infrastructure arriving together, or accept yet another amendment to one of Sefton’s biggest and long-running developments.

We’ll be following tonight’s meeting and will bring you the outcome after the latest discussions are done. In the meantime you can have a look at the plans and what else is on the agenda here.

before you hit the road …

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