Roofs are on at Glebelands in Cam and the 23 council homes are due next summer. Six days earlier, the council's planners refused its lighting and bat box plans.
The first roofs are on at Glebelands in Cam, where Stroud District Council is building 23 affordable homes. The council says the scheme is due to be finished next summer. It announced the milestone on Tuesday 29 September.
What the announcement did not say is that six days earlier, on 23 September, the council’s own planning department refused to sign off three of the scheme’s conditions: its outdoor lighting, its wildlife features and its landscaping. The refusal notice is on the planning register under reference S.26/1341/DISCON. The applicant was Stroud District Council itself.
A refusal like this does not stop the building work. The council can send in revised details, and it will need to. The landscaping has to be approved before anyone moves in.
What is being built
The homes are on a former independent living site off Fairmead. The mix is:
- eight one-bedroom flats, four of them designed for older residents
- ten two-bedroom houses
- five three-bedroom houses
They will be let at affordable rent or sold through shared ownership. The council has not said how many of each. It says the homes will have air source heat pumps and solar panels, and that some will have mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. The contractor is Speller Metcalfe.
Caroline Dumas, the council’s Strategic Director of Resources, said there were “thousands of people on our housing register”, and that “every new home we deliver makes a difference”.
Why the details were refused
Two of the refused conditions are about bats. The planning conditions require a lighting strategy that keeps dark corridors for bats, and a set of wildlife features, including bat and bird boxes and gaps in fences for hedgehogs.
The problem is that the two documents submitted in August contradict each other. The council’s ecology officer found the lighting design would throw more than 104 lux of light onto the spot chosen for a bat box, near a footpath to the south west of the site. The officer said published guidance sets a maximum of 0.2 lux on such features, because bats avoid lit roosts. The refusal notice says the lighting would render the bat box “ineffective”.
The officer said an updated plan must find the bat box a new location. If that cannot be done, different lighting will have to be set out instead.
The third refusal is the landscaping. The case officer found the hard landscaping details were missing. The notice says they were requested on 10 August and “have not been received”.
Both the lighting and wildlife details were due within three months of above-ground construction starting, under conditions on the 2025 permission.
Five years from application to roofs
The scheme has been a long time coming. The council’s planning application (S.21/1305/FUL) was validated in June 2021. Permission to demolish the old buildings and build 23 homes was granted on 1 April 2022.
In 2025 the council went back for changes. Revised designs for two house types, and new floor levels on nine plots, were approved on 7 May 2025. The building materials were signed off on 14 November 2025.
The council’s other schemes
The council says Glebelands is part of a wider programme on land it already owns. It lists:
- Queens Drive, Cashes Green: seven affordable homes, nearing completion
- Gloucester Street and Bradley Street, Wotton-under-Edge: eight affordable rent homes, recently finished
- Cambridge Avenue, Dursley: thirteen social rent homes, recently finished
What it means for you
- If you are on the housing register. The homes are due next summer. The council has not yet said how they will be advertised or allocated, or the split between rent and shared ownership.
- If you live near Fairmead. Building work carries on. The outdoor lighting still needs approval, so what is finally installed may differ from the plans submitted in August.
- If you want to comment. Any fresh submission for these conditions will appear on the planning register under the Glebelands address. We track the district’s bigger decisions on our Stroud planning news page.
Sources
- Major milestone reached at affordable housing development in Cam, Stroud District Council, 29 September 2026, for the roofs, the 23-home mix, the tenures, the energy features, the contractor, the completion date, the quote and the other schemes.
- S.26/1341/DISCON, Stroud District Council planning register: the refusal notice and case officer’s review, both dated 23 September 2026, for the three refused conditions, the 104 lux and 0.2 lux figures, the ecology officer’s comments and the missing hard landscaping.
- S.21/1305/FUL, validated 22 June 2021 and permitted 1 April 2022.
- S.25/0313/VAR, permitted 7 May 2025, for the revised house types, the floor levels on plots 8 and 16 to 23, and the conditions now being discharged.
- S.25/1844/DISCON, permitted 14 November 2025, for the building materials.
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