Healthcare Development
Planning application: Change of Use from former offices to a health clinic.
Local Planning Authority: Crawley Borough Council.
Highway Authority: West Sussex County Council.
Outcome: Permission granted.
Planning Application
Pioneer Wound Healing & Lymphoedema Centres CIC is a specialist wound healing and lymphoedema service operating from clinic settings in multiple locations in Sussex. Serving the NHS as its main client, Pioneer is a national centre of excellence for the services it provides.
Connect Consultants was appointed to assist Pioneer with the traffic and transport matters of a planning application for a new clinic in Northwood Park, Crawley. We worked alongside planning consultant Vail Williams.
To enable this, Pioneer was seeking to change the use of Swift House from its previous use as an office to a clinic with 17 clinic rooms, and retaining the existing 27 car parking spaces.
Our job was to assess the implications in traffic terms of the proposed healthcare development, and the associated demand for parking, and importantly the opportunities for non-car travel to the site.
We produced a Transport Statement for the assessment, and we worked with Pioneer to produce a Travel Plan to help encourage its staff to travel by sustainable travel modes.
As Pioneer is a specialist service with different operating patterns from typical health/medical clinics, we made use of first-principles travel information and car parking data gathered from the organisation’s main site in Eastbourne.
Our analysis showed that the proposed change of use would result in a reduction in the number of trips to/from the site when compared to its existing use as an office, and that the 27 car parking spaces would be enough to accommodate the clinic’s demand.
As the planning use class for health clinics covers a range of different types of health clinic, we also assessed the traffic effect if Swift House was ever to be occupied by a by a more general/typical health provider, for example a GP surgery, which would be more trip-intensive than Pioneer.
We showed that when compared to the existing use as an office, a GP surgery would typically attract more vehicle trips per day, but only a small number more during the AM and PM peak hours. And with the car parking, the high turnover associated with a GP surgery means that the car park would be big enough for the demand.
Our Transport Statement and Travel Plan were both reviewed by the Local Highway Authority, West Sussex County Council Highways, in their consideration of the planning application. The County Highways review concluded that they had no objection to the proposed change of use, and planning permission was subsequently granted by Crawley Borough Council.