Welsh city to build new care home complete with cinema and tea room

Nicholas Thomas, Local democracy reporter

Designs for a new care home in a Welsh city have won the unanimous support of the city council’s planning committee.

The 66-bed residential care home will include a cinema, library, lounge and tea room once it is built in the northeastern corner of the former Whiteheads steelworks site in Newport.

Standing three storeys in height, the home will occupy a currently empty space on the development site, where the construction of hundreds of new homes is nearing completion.

Landscaping and a car park will be added around the building, as well as an ambulance and taxi drop-off zone and space for mobility scooters to be charged, case officer Grant Hawkins told the committee.

He said each bedroom will have a “suitably-sized” window and the home will have two central lifts to reach each floor.

Some nearby homes would be less than 20 metres from the new building, but “no significant harm has been identified for residential amenity," he added.

Planning documents submitted on behalf of applicant LNT Care Developments Ltd adds the new care home will create between 50 and 60 jobs, and will serve as “a local community care facility, the residents of which are expected to emanate from an area no more than three miles from the site but generally closer."

But the committee also heard concerns the care home would occupy a site previously earmarked for other uses, such as commercial space.

Cllr Gavin Horton asked “what’s being put in place to mitigate the loss” of those units from the site.

“I was told categorically that when there were a certain number of houses [built], that was when they would start to build those units,” he said. “How many of the residents would have purchased those houses under that misconception? It doesn’t seem quite right.”

Mr Hawkins said he couldn’t comment on the residential developer’s sales, but agreed the proposals for the wider site at the initial planning permission stage had included a “mixed use” of units in that northeastern corner.

“It could be a shop or public house – I don’t think it was specified,” he explained. “No reserved matters applications have come forward.”

“Presumably there was no appetite for that,” he said, adding that the council opened a consultation on the “standalone” care home plans to residents of 104 nearby homes but received only “one objection – and that was in relation to parking."