DETAILED planning permission has been granted for up to 199 golfing homes at the St Mellion International Resort.

The approval of the plans by Cornwall Council continues its support for up to 265 holiday homes to be built at the site.

Planning committee members met this week to decide whether to approve the finer detail of the plans for two of the three areas to be developed on the golf club site.

This detail includes the layout and style of the houses to be built.

Concerns had been raised by residents and the parish council over the seemingly ‘residential’ look of the new development.

The designs show an area of semi-detached and terraced houses, each with a garden and two parking spaces, and roads much like a typical housing estate.

The parish council had objected to the scheme, and had said that should the owners of the resort, Crown Golf, wish to create a residential development, then a new application should be submitted.

A resident who spoke in objection to the plans at Monday’s meeting, Hilary Gill, had expressed the view that St Mellion village could not sustain a further 200 homes, and was concerned about access to the new houses through the narrow lanes of the resort.

Afterwards, she said that the decision ‘had gone the way she thought it would’.

Crown Golf told the Cornish Times in January that it had not received any interest in holiday homes from either buyers or investors, and said that it was ‘exploring all opportunities’ with regard to the type of housing it wished to create at St Mellion.

But council planning officer Matthew Stephenson, who recommended that Monday’s committee meeting approve the scheme, said that the apparent discrepancy between ‘holiday’ or ‘residential’ housing should not be a reason to refuse the plans.

In his report he stated: ‘The layout of the two sites is in some ways more akin to a more traditional residential scheme you may find in an urban area, it being laid out as terrace rows and pairs of semis. However, this in itself is not a reason to refuse consent. Whilst to a degree different to other holiday home development it would be speculation to say whether or not such holiday homes would or would not be successful in finding buyers or investors.’

Cornwall Councillor for St Mellion Jim Flashman told Monday’s committee that he supported the golf homes scheme and that ‘it was an improvement on what was there originally’.