A beloved and popular Somerset rugby club is urging the council to speedily approve plans for it to relocate to brand new facilities – and deliver affordable homes in the process.

Wells Rugby Football Club currently has 16 teams (including women's and children's sides) and 239 paying members, playing its home games on Charter Way near the city's leisure centre (which was recently taken over by Freedom Leisure as part of a wider rescue package).

The club has been striving since 2009 to move to a bespoke new home off the A371 Portway at the western edge of the city, with more pitches, improved player facilities and a better space for hosting club and community events.

The club signed a contract with Stonewater in October 2022, which would allow the housing association to deliver up to 97 affordable homes for local residents on the old pitches once the club had successfully relocated.

Now club officials are urging Somerset Council to make a decision on both sets of plans before Christmas to enable the move to get under way.

If such a decision is not forthcoming, the club may have to wait at least another year for the move to happen – and rising building costs may stretch the viability of both its and Stonewater's schemes to their breaking point.

Club chairman Ben Knight and former chairman Nick Heath sat down with the Local Democracy Reporting Service in Wells recently to discuss what the change would mean for the club.

Mr Heath said: "We will probably increase player numbers by 100 or more if and when we move to the new facilities, because the facilities will be so much better and therefore our catchment area will grow.

"We had a benefactor who enabled us to buy the land for the new facility – that was in 2009 – fast forward 17 years, we're still paying off that loan."

The Charter Way site was allocated within the Mendip Local Plan Part II (which was ratified in December 2021) to deliver a minimum of 80 homes – with the land off Portway being allocated within the same plan for the club's relocation.

At the insistence of Sport England, Stonewater has to "release funds" for the club to occupy its new home in the Haybridge area of the city before construction work can begin on any new homes on Charter Way.

Mr Heath said: "Stonewater were by far the most competitive bidder when we went out to tender on the Charter Way site – no-one else offered the type of money that was required to enable the project to happen.

"Because Stonewater are a housing association, they can get hold of government grants which enable them to do the housing that they're planning.

"In terms of the security of the development, we have to be playing rugby at Heybridge before they can do a thing."

Stonewater has already delivered a number of affordable housing developments in Somerset – including 125 homes at the Mulberry Meadows estate in Castle Cary, 30 properties at Flax Court in South Petherton, and 24 homes at the Cherry Grove site in Frome (with the latter two sites being built to Passivhaus standards for exceptional energy efficiency).

The housing association originally put forward plans for 106 homes on the existing pitches, which have been reduced to 97 following lengthy negotiations with the council's planning officers.

Each of the new homes would be prioritised for local residents and would be offered below the market price, with 59 being social rent, 28 being shared ownership and the remaining ten being offered as 'rent to buy' properties.

The planned development will also provide around £65,000 for local health services and provide a short northern extension of the Strawberry Line active travel route, which currently runs on public roads between the leisure centre and the Lidl supermarket near West Street.

These plans have already secured the backing of Wells City Council – but Somerset Council has taken more than a year to make a decision.

Mr Knight said: "The city council have been surprisingly positive.

"When you've been involved in this project so long and had so many hurdles to jump over, you kind of set yourself up almost for negativity, I suppose."

Mr Heath said that if planning permission for both elements were granted by Somerset Council before Christmas, the club would be able to move into its new home in time for the 2027/28 season.

He said: "The clubhouse build is 44 weeks, but that can run concurrently with the playing field side of things.

"We've been working on the Section 106 agreement with Somerset Council in the background; it's obviously going to take a little bit of time once it goes over the line, but we're not starting with a blank piece of paper.

"The crucial thing for us is the fact that you need a growing season before you can play – so if we don't get this planning sorted this year, we will be, we will miss the window for us to start putting spades in.

"If it goes through in November, It'll take a little time to do the contracts, but if they can start February or March next year, then we'll probably have the growing season.

"If we miss the growing season, we'll be put back another year. That's why this November is so crucial for us."

Any such delays would be potentially catastrophic for the club, leading to existing players going to other clubs and the plans having to be scaled back or reworked from the ground up in light of high inflation within the construction industry.

Mr Heath said: "If you think about the things that have happened recently – we've had covid, the phosphates issues on the Levels, and general building inflation.

"We've already had to revamp our design and the number of pitches we're going to deliver two or three times. We're now almost at the minimum requirements to satisfy Sports England and to enable us to provide the facilities that the club needs.

"If we've delayed another year and it goes up another ten per cent, we'd have to either try and revise our plans again or give up. We are literally at that point."

Wells has seen significant housing growth on its western edge in recent years, with construction currently under way on 100 new homes south of the B3139 Elm Close and outline permission in place for a further 47 properties near Gypsy Lane.

Somerset Council's planning committee east voted on October 6 to approve detailed plans for 50 new homes south of Wells Touring Park – a short distance from where the new clubhouse could be erected.

Mr Knight said that the club's relocation would provide this end of the city with a bona fide community hub – making it all the more essential for consent to be granted as soon as humanly possible.

He said: "We can't make the planned changing rooms any smaller than they already are; we need six changing rooms and referees' facilities too.

"The changing room facilities will have to remain what we've got in planning now. The only thing we can realistically lose is part of the clubhouse, and that's going to reduce our ability to make more money.

"There aren't a huge number of facilities to host meetings and conferences in the local area, so we do feel like we can offer that and make it sustainable.2

Mr Heath added: "The NHS blood service doesn't come to Wells now because no-one can get to the city hall and there's no parking near there now.

"We would want to offer the venue to them. We've been approached by a baseball team, an archery club and various other sporting organisations who want to use the facility and the grounds.

"Yes, it is going to be a rugby club, but for it to be viable, it needs to be a community hub as well.

"Under our business plan, we'll do weddings, birthdays and so on – but also the Wells Comedy Festival and the Wells Literary Festival are crying out for decent-sized venues, and we could seat 250 people. There is a massive community benefit here.

"This is probably the last chance that we have to provide some top class sports facilities within the city.

"The tennis club is struggling for space – they're not going to move. The football club is hamstrung with their space as well.

"If this gets blocked, no other housing association or house builder will touch the project."

The next meeting of the council's planning committee east will take place in Shepton Mallet on November 3 at 2pm.