Replacing Eggborough Power Station with employment and sports schemes 

The scheme also replaces sports pitches on nearby land.

After Eggborough Power Station’s decommissioning, property developer St. Francis Group purchased the 130-acre land by the M62 motorway to develop it into something that would bring positive socio-economic impact to the Selby community.

And given the site’s strategic location fronting the A19, one mile north of junction 34, our client saw a real opportunity to promote the area for a number of industrial and logistics units. These in turn would help capture regional demand from the ever-growing logistics market, where occupier requirements are increasingly driven by rapid growth in e-commerce.

Our application had to carefully this aspiration against several key matters that needed addressing, including transport, heritage, landscape and visual impact, ecology, contamination, flood risk, noise and air quality, socio-economic impacts. Many of these factors would become prevalent when putting together the sports facilities application.

To sell the local authority on the value of this scheme, our application delved into the economic justification for the proposed development, including the net number of new jobs created directly and indirectly from the scheme, long-term increase in Gross Value Added, greater local economy spending, and a new strategically significant distribution facility.

Tetra Tech coordinated the Environmental Impact Assessment and Environmental Statement for the scheme, including in-house input on planning, socio-economic, and cumulative impact matters. We also liaised with the client’s technical team on other environmental disciplines.

We progressed pre-application discussion with local planning authority officers and councillors, coordinating the community consultation with the resulting Statement of Community Involvement.

While the former power station site did not benefit from a Local Plan site allocation, its status as previously developed land meant a planning application for employment use was the most appropriate strategy for beneficial site redevelopment, along with replacement of sports pitches on land to the east.

Decisions on the planning applications are awaited.