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Health campus project manager Kyle McClelland is pictured outling the plans.

The biggest planning application Watford has ever seen could be decided this week - almost a year after the proposal was formally submitted.

Plans to build the £1 billion Health Campus on the current 26 hectare site around Watford General will be voted on by councillors on Thursday night.

The meeting comes five months after the proposal was first discussed at the Town Hall, and ten months since a 2,000 page planning document was formally submitted to Watford Borough Council for consideration.

In December last year, the council's planning committee convened for a special planning meeting on the Health Campus.

However, the follow-up meeting has been pushed further and further back and suffered fresh delays after the Highways Agency made a "holding objection" on the plans.

Additional research has since been carried out into the impact the scheme will have on the M1 motorway.

Kyle McCelland, project manager for the Health Campus yesterday (Thursday) said the partners were still awaiting formal confirmation that the Highways Agency had dropped its objection, but was not expecting any last minute hitches.

The council's development control committee is expected to grant permission to build the new hospital, along with 300 new homes, offices, research facilities, restaurants and a hotel.

Health campus project manager Kyle McClelland is pictured outling the plans.

Mr McCelland said: "I would say it is the biggest application to come to Watford by some way.

"The last time anything of this size and scale hit Watford was probably when the railways came through 200 years ago."

Central to the Health Campus is a new 510-bed hospital to replace Watford General.

The plans also include a specialist women and children's unit, which will deliver 6,000 births a year, as well as a new mental health facility to replace the Shrodells Unit.

The hospital also promises to be one of the greenest developments in the country.

Rain water collected across the new campus will be reused to water the pitch at Vicarage Road, while the new hospital will be heated by a modern combined heat and power plant.

Jessie Winyard, chair of the patients' panel at Watford General said the new hospital would give residents "the health services they deserve".

She said: "Our view is that the buildings at Watford General are not suitable now for modern health care.

"By having the new hospital patients in west Hertfordshire will get the services we need and deserve.

"We deserve the best so we should get the best."

The Health Campus partners have been criticised by environmentalists over plans to construct a new link road on playing fields behind the Watford Irish Centre and next to Oxhey Park.

Watford Friends of the Earth have criticised the scheme for being too focused on people using their cars.

Mr McCelland, however, defended the road, saying it is crucial to the whole application. He added that all the Health Campus partners were "absolutely in support" of the Croxley Rail Link.

He said: "The important thing for us is not just the link road, or the Croxley Rail Link, or buses, it is all of it.

"It is making that hospital as accessible as we possibly can."

He added: "For me the main reason for the road is to try and improve access for emergency vehicles.

"All the other stuff that has come up around the alignment of the link road and the transport assessment, it is, as far as I'm concerned, just noise. The justification is there."

12:48pm Sunday 11th May 2008

Health campus project manager Kyle McClelland is pictured outling the plans.

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