PLANS for a new football stadium and 600 homes in Braintree have been approved.
At a full council meeting on Monday night, Braintree district councillors met to rubber stamp a master plan for developing land near Panfield Lane, to the north west of Braintree in order to meet government housing targets.
During that meeting 600 new homes, a 6,000-seater football stadium, 15 hectares of employment land and a new link road connecting Springwood Drive with Panfield Lane, were given the go ahead.
Braintree Town Football Club has been hoping to move from its current site in Clockhouse Way for eight years.
As well as a stadium that can cope with the capacity required for the growing club, the master plan shows allocated land that will include parking and suitable sports facilities as well as two entrances to the stadium.
Lee Harding, chairman of the football club, was delighted with the news.
"We started talking with Braintree council about our need for relocation as long ago as 2004 and approval of the master plan is a major step forward for our new stadium aspirations," he said.
"The council have put in an enormous amount of work to get this far and we really do now see light at the end of the tunnel.
"We may still be a few years away from kicking a ball at the new ground, but the coming months will see us working closely with the council on both the design and funding of the new stadium."
Braintree district councillors voted in September 2011 to adopt the council's Local Development Framework Core Strategy, as it is known, which earmarked the farmland between Springwood Drive Industrial Estate and Panfield Lane as a future development site to meet Government housing targets.
Since then, the plans have gone to public consultation and revised additions were approved last week, which included making an area for community sports large enough to accommodate a full-size football pitch and restricting the link road to car and bus use only.
