A retrospective traveller caravan site at Chestnut Paddocks, Titchfield, was refused on 14 August. Fareham's own plan owes three pitches, and the one site it allocated needed an appeal to get permission.

Fareham Borough Council has refused a retrospective application to keep a traveller caravan site on Titchfield Road. The decision on P/26/0249/FP was issued on 14 August 2026, the same day as the council’s own target date for determining it.

The application covered land at Chestnut Paddocks, 221 Titchfield Road, Titchfield, PO14 3EW, in the Titchfield ward. The council’s case tracker records the proposal in full as a “retrospective change of use of land to a mixed use for equestrian and a residential caravan site for a single traveller family comprising the stationing of two static caravans; landscaping and laying of road planings (reclaimed asphalt) on top of hoggin subsurface to create 5.0m wide hardsurfaced access track from Titchfield Road”. Retrospective means the work had already been carried out when permission was sought.

The application was received on 2 March 2026 and made valid two days later. The agent is Southern Planning Practice and the case officer is Hannah Goldsmith. It is the only application recorded against that address on the borough’s planning register.

What the record does not say

The council’s case tracker publishes the decision but not the decision notice, so the written reasons for refusal are not on it, and Fareham does not put planning application documents online at all. Its committee papers site, fareham.moderngov.co.uk, could not be reached on 17 August: every request returned a security challenge rather than the page. We are not going to repeat someone else’s account of what was said in the committee room, so this report states what the register records and nothing beyond it. The written reasons normally reach the council’s weekly decision lists in summary form, and the next list to be published will be the one for the week ending 16 August.

Three pitches the borough still has to find

The refusal lands against a specific commitment. Policy HP11 of the Fareham Local Plan 2037, adopted in 2023, opens with a flat statement: “The Plan will meet the need for three Gypsy and Traveller pitches as identified in the Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation Assessment. Site HA45 is allocated for three pitches to meet this need.”

That figure of three comes from the Hampshire Gypsy, Traveller and Travelling Showpeople Accommodation Assessment of 2017, prepared for a consortium of Hampshire councils. It found two Gypsy or Traveller households in Fareham that met the planning definition, and a need for three more pitches to 2036, made up of two concealed households and one teenage child who would need a pitch of their own. The Local Plan records that at the time of writing the borough had three private permanent sites and one with temporary permission, 11 permitted pitches in total (paragraph 5.91).

Policy HP11 also sets out what any additional site has to satisfy: access to shops, schools and health facilities by public transport, on foot or by bike; no unacceptable impact on trees, biodiversity, neighbours’ living conditions, landscape character, the historic environment or rights of way; not in a high flood risk area; not in open countryside away from settlements unless it complies with the countryside policy DS1; and adequate parking, access, storage, amenity space and services on site.

The borough’s allocated site had to win an appeal

HA45 is land at the rear of 77 Burridge Road, Burridge, a 0.17 hectare plot allocated in the Local Plan for exactly three pitches, with conditions attached about biodiversity, layout and single-storey buildings only.

Getting permission there was not straightforward either. The council’s register shows that P/24/0476/CU, for change of use of that land to the stationing of caravans for residential purposes with hardstanding and dayrooms, was appealed, and the appeal was allowed on 19 November 2025. The application had been submitted in April 2024 with a target decision date of 17 June 2024.

The site has moved on since. In June this year the council approved P/24/0476/DP/A, discharging condition 3 (nitrate mitigation) and condition 4 (water efficiency) from that permission, on 22 June 2026. Discharging conditions is the step that clears a scheme to start.

Timeline of traveller pitch provision in Fareham borough: 11 pitches already permitted across four sites, a need for three more identified in 2017, site HA45 allocated in the 2023 Local Plan, permission at Burridge Road allowed on appeal in November 2025, conditions discharged in June 2026, and the Titchfield Road application refused in August 2026

So the position as of this week is that the borough’s three planned pitches exist on paper and cleared their conditions in June, having got their permission from a planning inspector rather than from the council, and a second traveller site proposed elsewhere in the borough has been refused.

What it means for you

  • The full record for the refused application, including the applicant, agent, case officer and every date, is public on the council’s case tracker. Search the reference P/26/0249/FP or the street name.
  • A refusal is not necessarily the end of it. Under the government’s planning appeal rules, an appeal to the Planning Inspectorate can be made against a decision on “an application you made yourself, or … on behalf of someone else”. In other words the appeal route belongs to the applicant. There is no equivalent right for objectors, or for anyone who wanted the site approved. Nothing had been recorded against this application as of 17 August.
  • Because the use was already on the ground, the next stage is a matter for the council’s enforcement team rather than its planning committee. The council has not published an enforcement position and we are not going to guess at one.
  • We track new applications and decisions across the borough on our Fareham planning news page.