A FORMER Crediton GP surgery is to be converted into four children’s homes.

Despite some concerns, Mid Devon District Council’s planning committee unanimously approved the plan for the old Newcombes Surgery, which closed in 2021 when its services were incorporated into Crediton’s new Redlands Primary Care building.

Last year the committee approved a separate plan for the surgery to be turned into residential properties, though it was told at the time that an application for the children’s homes was in the pipeline.

The building will now be converted into four units, one of which will have three bedrooms and the rest four bedrooms. Each will have separate access at the front and private garden areas at the rear, while the existing car park will be mostly retained with 14 spaces.

An adjoining bungalow, which formerly served the health centre as a pharmacy and office, already has planning permission to become either a children’s home or another residential property.

According to the operator,  Central and Southern Homes, no more than six children, aged between eight and 18, will live across the four homes at any one time.

However, 15 objections were raised to the application, including that the home would be “a recipe for anti-social behaviour,” along with a loss of privacy and further pressure on the limited parking in the area.

Speaking at the meeting on Wednesday, January 4, objector Steve Howells asked members to think back to why they became councillors in the first place.

“I would hope that for most of you, it’s got something to do with wanting to represent your communities and stand up for their interests, not just rubber-stamping applications made by opportunistic developers from outside of the county looking to snap up sites at bargain basement prices and make a killing from the vast sums of money available from the government for so-called residential care,” he said.

“There’s ample planning grounds on which to reject this application – the sheer scale of it being just one,” added Mr Howells, who also criticised a “huge” 1.8-metre-high fence that would be going up around the site.

But Katie Howard, representing the applicant Central and Southern Homes, said the company “looks to provide local homes for local children” and that its existing homes were all recently rated as good by Ofsted.

“I understand people’s concerns around children in care, but actually children in care deserve to live in their own local authorities as well,” she said.

“There is no reason why Devon children, when they have to be brought into care because they’ve suffered abuse or vulnerability in their own home, should then be moved out to a local authority outside and lose those family connections.

“What we’re doing is trying to provide these homes for those children.”

Ms Howard also told the meeting that children will be “highly supported”, including being supervised when visiting the local park, and claimed: “Actually, a lot of times children’s homes can positively impact a community.”

Debating the plan, Councillor Polly Colthorpe (Conservative, Way ward), said she could understand why locals “may feel anxiety about this”, but told the committee it is “always difficult to find appropriate places (for children in care)”.

Cllr Colthorpe believed it was “a very small number of children in the context and they are likely to be of varying ages”, adding that she thought children of that age tended not to hang around and play with those significantly older or younger.

“So, that these children pose any kind of a threat I find difficult to believe, given that the whole idea is to integrate these children better into society,” she concluded.

Councillors approved the application unanimously.

Ollie Heptinstall