The fields on the western edge of Carmarthen, between the A40 at the Travellers Rest roundabout and the old St David’s Hospital, are getting 84 more houses.
They go on a field beside the new link road the council built through that land, known as Ffordd Pendre, on the far side of the trees from the Maes Pedr estate. It is one field in a plan the council calls Carmarthen West, which has been filling those fields with housing for a decade and is meant to end up with 1,100 homes, a primary school and a row of shops.
Half of the 84 will be affordable, according to the plans approved by Carmarthenshire Council‘s planning committee on Thursday. Twenty-five would go to the council to let at social rent, 17 would be low-cost ownership and 42 would be sold on the open market. The council owns the field and Lovell Partnerships will build on it.
Officers told the committee that is a far bigger share of affordable homes than the rest of Carmarthen West was asked for. Other developers on the site were allowed to build at 12%, planning officer John Thomas said. This one is 50%.
Heat pumps for all, solar panels only for the council’s 25
The officer report lists two-storey houses in brick, render and stone: 16 four-beds, 15 three-beds and 11 two-beds for sale, and a mix from one-bed flats to four-bed houses on the affordable side, spread through the estate rather than grouped in one corner.
Every house would get an air source heat pump, the report says, and the council’s rented ones would get solar panels. Carmarthen Town Council said it was disappointed the panels are not going on all 84; officers replied there is no planning policy that lets them require it.
At the roundabout end the plans show a small park with a play area, picnic tables and a bank slide. Mr Thomas said it would be run by a residents’ management company that buyers pay into, “not a burden on us as a council, nor on the town council”. At the far end, behind the byway, a basin would take the rainwater.
£458,000 for a school that nobody has yet applied to build
A school. Carmarthen West was allocated in the council’s 2014 plan for around 1,100 homes with a primary school and a local centre. The report says the school site is across Ffordd Pendre from the new estate and that detailed proposals for it “are yet to be progressed”.
Lovell will pay £458,178 towards the school and the link road, which the report puts at £10,909 for every house sold on the open market. Cllr Russell Sparks, one of the two local members for Carmarthen West, told the meeting: “We’ve got a significant community growing that needs a school.”
Mr Thomas said his department is holding the contributions but cannot spend them. “It falls to education to submit an application for the school,” he said. “It’s outside of our hands.”
A bus. The report confirms no service runs along Ffordd Pendre, though lay-bys have been built for one; the nearest is at the estate’s south-east corner.
Cllr Sparks also raised the one-way stretch of Old St Clears Road, which he said forces people on the new estates to drive up the hill and round to get home and leaves a narrow pinch point for anyone walking or cycling into town. A highways officer said it was outside this application but would be considered under the Carmarthen active travel plan the council is drawing up.
A playground in town will take the rain so the Towy takes less sewage
The estate would drain to Welsh Water’s Parc y Splott works off Llansteffan Road, which the report says is currently failing one of its flow performance standards. Welsh Water objected on that basis.
The workaround set out in the report is to take rainwater out of the sewer elsewhere in the same catchment: four litres a second from the playground at St Mary’s Primary School, on council land, into a new soakaway. Mr Thomas told the committee that would free capacity at the works and should mean fewer storm overflows, “so there should be less sewage discharges into the Towy as a result of the development”.
Cllr Sparks had asked for that reassurance, telling colleagues that NRW’s own reporting pointed to salmon being extinct in the Towy by 2030. Mr Thomas said the playground scheme means the council’s assessment of the risk to the river now has to be revised, and the report says the permission depends on Natural Resources Wales accepting it.
‘Nobody can build them for that cost’: why the other 42 go on the open market
Cllr Ken Howell asked why, if the council owns the field and affordable homes are what is needed, every house could not be affordable. Mr Thomas said an affordable home sells for less than it costs to build. “Nobody can build them for that cost,” he said, adding that such homes rely on Welsh Government grant.
Cllr Jean Lewis asked what had happened to the doctors’ surgery she understood was in the original plan. Mr Thomas said one practice had recently moved to Parc Dewi Sant across the link road; Cllr Sparks said much of the town’s health provision would move to Atriwm, the health and university centre planned for the old Debenhams.
The vote was carried by a majority rather than unanimously. The report says no members of the public objected.
A decade in, Carmarthen West has its estates but not its school, shops or bus
Carmarthen West is the council’s main growth site for the town: the farmland running from the A40 up to College Road and Pentremeurig, west of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David campus and the Parc Dewi Sant offices on the old hospital site. The council paid for the link road through it, from a new roundabout on the A40 to College Road, and expects each estate along it to pay a share back. The report says the estates at the A40 end, Maes Pedr, Maes Elen and Maes Magsen, are complete and Maes y Teirw is nearing completion. At the hospital end Persimmon secured permission for 93 homes in 2023 and applied for 123 more in 2024.
The report describes this as the first of the fields west of the link road to come forward, with land to the north and west allocated for later phases. Its transport assessment puts the estate at around 480 vehicle movements a day, which the council’s highways department said the link road and the A40 junction can absorb without changes.
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