PEOPLE power won the day as planners told a consortium hoping to build up to 2,000 homes on farmland to get their act together.

Over 200 people packed into Taunton Deane Council’s planning meeting at the Blackbrook Pavilion to air their views on the proposals for the development between Comeytrowe, in Taunton, and Trull.

The four companies who put forward the scheme were told to engage with the council to help form a masterplan to ensure highways, education, health and access maters were in place.

Before the application was deferred at the end of the five-hour meeting, Cllr Jefferson Horsley said: “The long-term future of Taunton is at stake.”

The applicants could conceivably appeal the decision, which flew in the face of an officers’ recommendation, although they are expected to sit down with council representatives to ensure the project is not “piecemeal”.

A total of 35 people, most of them opposed to the plans in their current form, spoke after a presentation by the council’s planning chief John Burton, who outlined the application for outline permission for up to 2,000 homes, employment land, a primary school, a park and bus facility, a local centre with shops and open spaces.

The applicants were also requesting full planning permission for three access roads – off the A38 at Rumwell and Honiton Road, including roundabouts, and off Comeytrowe Lane.

Opponents told the meeting of their concerns that the application was “premature” and in its current form would cause worse traffic congestion; a strain on infrastructure; flooding; a lack of secondary school places nearby, forcing children to travel across town; and the destruction of a historic part of Trull.

Trull Planning Group complained that their hard work investigating what their parish needed had been ignored, while it was also claimed there need to be more jobs in the area to produce the demand for more housing.

Trull district councillor Mark Edwards said: “Masterplanning needs to join up with everything else that’s going on (in the Taunton area) – this entire process seems to have happened in isolation.”

Consortium representatives said there had been widespread consultation and the site had been allocated for housing in the Deane’s core strategy, which outlines where homes could be built over the next 12 years.

Chris Winter, of Summerfield Developments, one of the developers, said the development would help create up to 850 jobs, adding: “It would meet the needs of our increasing population.

“We want a sustainable development and to create communities where people will want to live and work.”

Before councillors deferred their decision to a later date, they were warned that they risked provoking an appeal by the applicants, which the Deane was likely to lose at great expense to the council taxpayer.

After the meeting, a Taunton Deane Council spokeswoman said the consortium of developers have been invited to work with the council, three parish councils and other key stakeholders on a revised masterplan to ensure the development is “deliverable and sustainable”.

Cllr Roger Habgood, executive councillor for planning, policy and transportation, said: “The council is committed to the delivery of this site for a mixed-use urban extension, and recognises the work that has been put in by the consortium so far.

“However, this is one of the largest applications that has ever come forward for Taunton and it is imperative that we work with the developers to ensure that the new community satisfies the needs of both existing and potential new residents.”