A specialist care home company is back with new plans for a 32-bedroom brain injury complex on green belt land.

Enable Care has submitted new designs for a former warehouse site off St Mary’s Lane in Upminster after Havering Council blocked earlier plans due to their impact on the green belt and lack of appropriate landscaping.

The acquired brain injury unit will provide people who have suffered cerebral damage after birth with their own rooms and shared spaces for accommodation and rehabilitation. 

The proposed units would face the road, with what documents refer to as a “public meadow” behind it. 

Plans also include a wellbeing garden for patients, a 24-bay car park, cycle storage, and extensive soft landscaping. 

In the application, agents Strutt and Parker claim on behalf of Enable Care that the new submission is an improvement on the previous one, including reduced traffic impact, less impact on local services and the "significant positive benefit" of public open space. 

It adds that there is an “acute shortage...both national and locally” of acquired brain injury units with “significant" evidence-based need for this type of care facility in this location. 

The intention remains to build on the green belt, though Strutt and Parker states the new submission represents a reduction in the size of the proposed site, and that the impact on the green belt would be “modest”.

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In total, Strutt and Parker predict 65 employees will work on-site if the unit is approved, which they claim will provide a "significant" benefit to the local economy. 

Enable Care was approached for comment, but said it had nothing to add at this time. 

View the application on Havering Council’s planning portal using the reference P1963.22.