PONTRILAS has been put forward by a countryside protection chief as a potential site for a ‘new town’.

Backing the concentration of 10,000 new homes in west Hereford rather than spreading them around the region, CPRE Herefordshire director Andrew McRobb said that creating a new town near the border village, 10 miles north of Abergavenny, would also be an alternative to “just building serries ranks of new houses” county-wide.

A campaign, backed by South Herefordshire MP Jesse Norman, to reopen Pontrilas Railway Station, on the line linking Hereford with South Wales, has recently been taken on by Herefordshire Council, who are spending £50,000 on developing a “strategic outline business case” for the proposed Golden Valley Parkway.

And despite opposing plans to build thousands of new homes in Hereford alongside the planned western bypass, Herefordshire transport campaigner Liz Morawiecka has also backed the idea of expanding Pontrilas, saying it is “ripe for development” given its local industry, rail and road links.

Herefordshire Council expects the western bypass project to the city’s west to “create over 10,000 new homes and over 300 acres of new employment land”, and has committed to spending over £40m on the first, southern phase alone.

“It far better to concentrate new housing in one place, with the infrastructure already in place, than to just spread those 10,000 around the county,” says Andrew McRobb, director of countryside charity CPRE Herefordshire.

In other large recent developments such as in Ledbury, “there’s no infrastructure, no work for them locally, you can’t even walk or cycle to the shops”, he claimed.

But creating a new town near Pontrilas, in the southwest of the county, north of Abergavenny, would also be an alternative to “just building serries ranks of new houses”, he added.

And while CPRE originally opposed the western bypass plan, he personally favours it.

“I’m always getting stuck in traffic,” he said. “We must be the only city that has tractors and combines driving through it.”

But Mrs Morawiecka said that despite the cost of the bypass scheme at potentially over £350m, “I don’t know where the people in all those houses will work”.

A long-delayed planning application for 1,200 homes at Three Elms drew strong objections from Heineken and Avara, two of the county’s largest employers, over the scheme’s possible impact on water quality, she pointed out.

And the prospect of “people retiring here from southeast England” would put pressure on the county’s already strained care system, she claimed.

Mrs Morawiecka said much of the city congestion is down to the school run, given most parents feel cycling to school is unsafe – a problem which could be addressed cheaply.