The Summer Berry Company sought assistance from Paul Basham Associates for a 2,100sqm expansion to their existing operations at Groves Farm in Chichester. The expansion would allow for packaging and distribution to occur onsite.
The Brief
The Summer Berry Company had the ultimate aim of submitting a detailed planning application for their expansion project. We utilised our knowledge of the local area and also our previous experiences working on other sites of a similar nature to suggest the scope of Transport Planning works which included pre-application support, a Transport Assessment and Travel Plan.
Our Approach
To inform our reports it was crucial for the Paul Basham Associates team to understand the current operations on site, the staff levels and how large vehicles access the site. To do this a site visit was undertaken and a meeting held to discuss how the expansion may impact the current work of the site, would there need to be more staff for example. Following this confirmation, we prepared a Transport Scoping Note to inform Pre-application discussions with West Sussex County Council and used this report to agree a first principles approach as well as the scope of highways works required to support a detailed planning application.
Once pre-application feedback was received, amendments to the scheme were made to enable the submission of the planning application. Paul Basham Associates prepared a Transport Assessment and Travel Plan to support the application. The Transport Assessment focused on confirming the highway impact of the expansion in comparison to the existing operations on site and explaining the methodology behind how the impact of the expansion had been calculated
Our Travel Plan was an updated strategy to the site’s existing Travel Plan measures that made this a more formal arrangement and indeed was used as a tool to identify the sustainable measures that site staff already benefit such as a site staff bus service.
The Result
The site received planning consent in October 2022. We look forward to visiting the site once the expansion is up and running.