Cornwall Council has been warned it must engage with residents who live near the mooted Langarth Garden Village development on the outskirts of Truro to ensure it does not become another Saints Trail “fiasco”.

The point was made by a local councillor as planners allowed an important part of the huge new community to be built.

An extraordinary meeting of Cornwall Council’s strategic planning committee on Thursday (May 18) agreed that two sewage pumping stations should be built as a vital part of the infrastructure for the garden village near Threemilestone, which was given planning permission in April 2022. The pumping stations will service the almost-4,000 homes at Langarth and will be based on land at Governs, near Threemilestone, and Penventinnie Lane, Truro.

Part of the Government’s garden communities programme which aims to address national housing needs, the new ‘village’ will see around 3,550 new homes built over a 20- to 25-year period, 35 per cent of which have been labelled as affordable for local people. It will also see the creation of new schools, health, cultural, faith, leisure and community facilities, and green areas with trees, walking and cycle ways.

Richard Cleghorn, technical lead for Langarth Garden Village, said: “The pumping stations will allow us to deliver the wider infrastructure that we need to allow housing and local facilities to be built at Langarth to meet our planned delivery time scales. The second location is more sensitive as it’s closer to people’s houses so we’ve tried to consult with everybody to come up with what we think is a sensible compromise on the location.”

The works will pump sewage through the existing system to the upgraded Calenick Pumping Station and on to Newham Waste Water Treatment Works in Truro, which was upgraded to the tune of £6.9m by South West Water in 2020 to cope with the additional capacity.

However, Cornwall councillor Dulcie Tudor – whose division includes Langarth – issued a warning after a family living in the area were not told that plans for the Penventinnie Lane pumping station had changed and it would be built right next to their home.

She said the two pumping stations were originally planned for land further east, but when a revised application was lodged in November 2022 they’d moved and the second pumping station was right next door to the family’s house.

“In the meantime no one had thought to tell them that that had happened or give them an explanation as to why the locations were moved. I think that’s unfair and just plain wrong. A compromise was reached, but I’d just like to take the opportunity to say that this cannot happen going forwards with Langarth applications. Every resident and landowner, big or small, must be consulted,” added Cllr Tudor. “We must bring the community with us – engagement, engagement, engagement. Langarth cannot be another Saints Trail fiasco.”

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She was referring to a multi-million pound project to create new cycleways across Cornwall, which an independent review found was “undeliverable”. The Saints Trails approved by the council’s cabinet in 2019 aimed to create 30km of new multi-use trails for cyclists, walkers and horse riders. However, after a series of delays, the council scrapped half of the proposed routes and then reduced one of the two remaining pathways.

Criticism has been levelled at the council for not communicating changes to the project.

Cllr Tudor added: “Many of the members of the committee will be familiar with former councillor John Dyer’s ‘river of sewage’ speech that he talked about every time Langarth Garden Village was brought up and still does at parish council meetings. I disagreed with Cllr Dyer on that, but that is academic today as whatever our own thoughts on SWW’s capacity to deal with the sewage for the Truro and Kenwyn area, today we’re concerned with not what’s happening underground but what’s being built overground.”