An inspector refused the 40-pupil SEN school at Empshott on highway safety grounds. The national park has already resolved to approve a revised scheme for the same house.
A planning inspector has dismissed an appeal to turn a country house at Empshott into a school for 40 children with special educational needs. The village is about five miles north of Petersfield, in Hawkley parish.
The headline is not the whole story. The same authority that refused the scheme has already resolved to approve a revised version of it, for the same house and the same 40 pupils.
Inspector S Leonard dismissed the appeal on 14 July 2026, after a hearing at Four Marks Village Hall on 11 June and site visits in March and June. The decision is published on the South Downs National Park Authority’s appeal record for Empshott Grange, appeal reference 6001892.
What was proposed
The appeal scheme would have converted Empshott Grange, off Church Lane, from a house into an independent specialist day school. The inspector’s decision records that it would have provided:
- a maximum of 40 pupils with special educational needs, aged 5 to 16
- between 20 and 24 staff, and 24 full time equivalent jobs
- term-time opening only, Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm
- all pupils arriving by 9.30am and leaving by 3pm
- no wrap-around care, no after-school activities and no overnight accommodation
The house has not been permanently lived in since late 2018. A three-year permission for office use expired in late 2019.
Why it was refused
The national park authority refused the original application, reference SDNP/24/03736/FUL, on 22 May 2025. The reasons were highway safety and biodiversity net gain.
The inspector agreed on highway safety. Mill Lane and Church Lane are narrow, unlit single carriageway country lanes with no pavements and a 60mph national speed limit. Hampshire County Council, as local highway authority, objected.
Two junctions did the damage. The site access off Mill Lane sits so close to the Mill Lane and Church Lane junction that vehicles cannot enter without crossing the junction road markings. At the Mill Lane junction with the B3006, a driver turning left has visibility of about 11 metres.
The inspector wrote that traffic concentrated around school start and finish times could force vehicles to reverse back towards the B3006, or queue onto it, where two cars cannot pass. The risk of shunt-type collisions was real enough, the decision says, to justify the county council’s objection.
The appellant’s traffic case was that most pupils would share minibuses and taxis. The inspector did not accept it. Hampshire County Council, which arranges transport for children with an Education, Health and Care Plan, told the hearing it could not confirm that. The school has no pupils yet, so no home addresses, and the catchment would cover East Hampshire and beyond. The decision instead assumes a robust scenario of 40 individual pupil trips.
On the second refusal reason the inspector found for the school. A completed section 106 undertaking submitted at appeal secured off-site biodiversity gains of 29.70 per cent in habitat units and 11.29 per cent in hedgerow units, comfortably above the statutory 10 per cent minimum.
The benefits the decision accepts
The decision is unusually warm about what was being refused. It gives high weight to the social benefit of 40 specialist SEN places, citing an identified and growing need for that provision in East Hampshire, the wider region and nationally. The 24 jobs and the biodiversity gain get high weight too.
The inspector also recorded that the national park authority had raised no objection to the principle of a school there, nor to the design, the effect on neighbours, the landscape, the setting of the Grade I listed Holy Rood Church about 90 metres away, ecology, trees, flood risk or drainage.
Highway safety alone outweighed all of it.
The scheme that is going ahead
While the appeal was running, the applicant lodged a second application for the same school with a different access design. That application, reference SDNP/25/03084/FUL, would stop up the Mill Lane entrance entirely, widen Mill Lane to at least 4.8 metres on the approach to the B3006, provide displaced parking and improve visibility at the Church Lane junction.
At the June hearing the national park authority confirmed it has resolved to approve that revised application under officer delegated powers, subject to a legal agreement securing the highway works and the biodiversity net gain. The inspector recorded this in both her appeal decision and the accompanying costs decision.
The appeal still had to be dismissed. Planning appeal rules do not allow a scheme to evolve during an appeal, and the revised access works sit near several objectors’ homes and were never consulted on as part of the refused scheme. The inspector determined the appeal on the scheme people had actually been asked to comment on.
As of 30 August the revised application is still shown on the register as “Decision Pending”. Its recorded determination deadline was 1 October 2025, with an agreed expiry date of 28 November 2025. Both have passed.
The road works split opinion the other way
The two applications drew very different postbags, according to the comment totals on the register.
| Application | Comments | Objections | Supporting |
|---|---|---|---|
| SDNP/24/03736/FUL (refused) | 96 | 25 | 70 |
| SDNP/25/03084/FUL (pending) | 38 | 21 | 17 |
The first scheme drew nearly three supporters for every objector. The revised one, which adds the road widening and visibility works through the lanes, is close to evenly split.
The costs claim failed too
The applicant asked for a full award of costs against the national park authority, arguing it had failed to produce robust evidence for its highway objections and had delayed a scheme that should have been permitted.
The inspector refused that as well, finding the authority was entitled to refuse the application and to defend the appeal, that its reasons for refusal were “complete, precise, specific, and relevant”, and that Hampshire County Council had given clear and consistent advice throughout.
The decision also notes that the applicant did not seek pre-application advice from the highway authority before the first application, as national policy encourages, but did hold extensive pre-application talks with it before the second.
What it means for you
If you live in Empshott, Hawkley or along Mill Lane, the school is not off the table. The decision that matters now is on the second application, and the national park authority has already said it intends to approve it. The point at which the lanes get widened is the point at which that permission is issued.
If you commented on the first application, your comment does not carry over. The revised scheme has its own consultation, and the register shows 38 comments on it against 96 on the first.
If you are looking for a specialist school place, nothing has changed yet. No permission is in force and the school is not operating.
You can track the case yourself on the national park authority’s planning register. Applications inside the district but outside the national park go to East Hampshire District Council instead, and we round those up on our Petersfield planning news page.
Empshott Grange sits within the South Downs National Park, so the national park authority is the planning authority, not East Hampshire District Council. The site is in Hawkley parish, in the Ropley, Hawkley and Hangers ward.
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