The proposals also included the construction of two employment units to provide a total of 22,300 square metres of warehousing floorspace.
Pickles said in his decision letter (51-page / 494KB PDF) that the development would diminish too greatly the role of the Council's emerging development plan document (DPD) in governing housing decisions in Amthorpe.
Pickles said that the development would be consistent with the intentions for Amthorpe set out in Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council's Core Strategy (CS) in terms of expansion to meet housing requirements.
However, he said that no potential sites had yet been included in the Council's emerging DPD and that granting planning permission in advance of the DPD would "seriously diminish its role in determining the future location of housing at Armthorpe for which the indicative phasing in the CS does not envisage any allocations before 2016".
The provision of an additional 500 dwellings would represent a large proportion of the residential development intended for Armthorpe on sites yet to be identified and this would be a matter for the DPD process, Pickles said.
Pickles said that the Council had a five year housing supply and that the proposal would be premature in respect of the DPD unless there was an insufficient supply of available housing land. As the Council's current supply figure exceeded the five year requirement there was "no over-riding need to release the appeal site to contribute towards a five year supply of deliverable housing land," he said.
