Student flats approved despite distance from university

building and bring footfall to local businesses. Landlords are already converting traditional family homes into student HMOs to meet demand. Developments such as this will give Bristol planning the opportunity to reject HMO conversions, and help safeguard against future loss of traditional housing stock in the area.”

The student flats would be built from numbers 155 to 165 on West Street, by Paragon Developments. Car dealership Paramount Cars, founded in 1976, would be demolished. The dealership’s owner recently sold the site to the developers and retired.

The committee was split on whether new student flats should be built in this part of Bedminster, with some calling for developers to build more family homes instead, and others saying it was good to

“disperse student accommodation across the city”.

Councillor Tom Hathway said: “There’s clearly a problem with endless university expansion and it tickles me when developers come to us and say ‘we’re building student accommodation to help with the housing crisis’. The housing crisis we’ve got is that there aren’t enough family and affordable homes.

“If you want to help, build family and affordable homes, don’t build student accommodation. But obviously we don’t have the policies that can deal with that at the moment. I think it’s OK, it’s average. Given we’re quite limited in policy terms, I think I will have to vote for this.”

Supporting the plans, Councillor Ed Plowden said: “There’s clear evidence that a lack of student accommodation can affect housing availability across the city, so this is therefore justified. It’s good that we’re not having an over-concentration of student accommodation in certain areas, and dispersing it across the city is quite a good thing.”