Land off Eastbourne Road, Polegate (Aldi foodstore and care home)

6008314·Wealden·15 Sept 2026allowed·WD/2025/0904/MAJ

Tier label used

—

The tier sentence ¶70

“vitality or viability of nearby town or”

Summary

A hybrid scheme at Polegate: an Aldi foodstore in full and a care home in outline. Wealden refused it on five grounds. After a hearing the appeal was allowed. The key finding was that a site outside the local-plan development boundary was still within a "settlement" as defined in the 2026 Framework glossary, because it is enclosed by the built-up area, including a consented estate. So S4, not S5, applied. Moderate harm from losing the roadside tree belt came nowhere near substantially outweighing substantial housing-need weight for the care home and significant economic weight.

Why this is cited

This decision was picked up by the search on the words above, which refer to services, not to a settlement tier. retail "service centres"; not a tier.

Sources

Decision on the Planning Inspectorate appeals service · full decision note · letter pins-corpus/6008314.txt

One entry in a register of 203 decisions that matched the search for a settlement-tier label, each read at every matching passage and classified by how the label influenced the decision. The quotation was checked against the source named above. Not legal advice. © Planning Distilled. Text, data and images on this page are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: share and adapt them freely, with credit to Planning Distilled. Quotations from decision letters, plans and the Framework remain the copyright of their publishers. Source and data: github.com/planningdistilled/research.