A NEW farmhouse for ‘an essential rural worker’ at Loders has been refused planning consent by Dorset Council.

The application, for a three-bed house with four parking spaces on a grassland site Cloverleaf Farm at Yellow Lane was rejected for not meeting the criteria for an essential worker in the countryside.

Neighbours had supported the application for the home, to be used by Paul Newberry, a son of the family, with a view to taking over the majority of the farm business from his parents.

Dorset Council decided that the business plan has not demonstrated that either the existing business or the proposed plans generate sufficient work for the site to be treated as a full-time holding or require an essential need for on-site accommodation.

“The existing accounts and proposed budgets do not show viability in terms of rural planning. Therefore, there is no justification for a rural worker’s dwelling under the National Planning Policy Framework,” said a council report.

The planning case officer also commented that the site was unsustainable in open countryside and that the proposed home was an “overly large and suburban style of development which would be out of character with the relatively remote rural  with siting and use of materials which fail to appropriately respond to or reflect the established local character.”