32 two-bedroom holiday chalets are proposed on Green Belt behind the Starbucks at the former Four Alls Inn, Stockton on the Forest. Comments close 10 September.

A holiday park of 32 chalets would be built on Green Belt land behind the Starbucks drive-through at Stockton on the Forest, under a major planning application now open for comment at City of York Council.

Comments close on Thursday 10 September 2026. The council has until Monday 9 November to decide.

The application is 26/01380/FULM. It covers land to the rear of the former Four Alls Inn on Malton Road, YO32 9TW, about 5.7 miles north-east of York city centre. The applicant is Dennis Harley Developments Ltd. The agent is Total Planning Solutions (UK) Ltd of Middlesbrough. The case officer is Erik Matthews. The site sits in Strensall ward and Stockton-on-the-Forest parish.

The register lists 23 documents on the case. It shows ten parties consulted and two comments received so far, one of them an objection and none in support.

Timeline of planning application 26/01380/FULM: received 23 July, validated 10 August, ten consultees asked 20 August, Drainage Board replied 25 August, comments close 10 September, decision deadline 9 November 2026
The key dates on application 26/01380/FULM. Source: City of York Council's planning register, read on 27 August 2026.

What is proposed

The council’s register describes the scheme as the erection of 32 holiday chalets with associated access and landscaping. Each chalet would have:

  • two bedrooms, with an en-suite to the principal bedroom
  • a separate bathroom, a kitchen and an open-plan living and dining area
  • a private raised decking area
  • one allocated parking space with an electric vehicle charge point

Three visitor parking spaces would be provided, one of them accessible. Secure cycle storage is included. The chalets would sit around an internal access road, with the whole development reached through the existing Starbucks car park rather than a new junction on the A64.

The site was a pub until 2022

The Four Alls Inn stopped being a public house under permission 22/01668/FUL, approved on 1 December 2022. That allowed the change of use to a cafe with a drive-through, offices on the first floor, the detached garage converted to retail, an attenuation pond and an altered access from the A64. The applicant’s planning statement says the main building is now occupied by Starbucks.

The statement also records the earlier history of the pub site. Application 20/00526/FUL, for a very similar conversion, was refused by the council and then allowed on appeal. In 2019, permission was granted under 19/02018/FUL to demolish the pub and build two five-bedroom houses instead.

The Green Belt argument

The applicant’s own statement is blunt about the policy problem. It says the site lies within the York Green Belt and outside any defined settlement, and that development there is inappropriate unless it falls within a listed exception.

The case is therefore built on “very special circumstances”. The applicant argues that the harm to the Green Belt is outweighed by the tourism and economic benefits, and offers planning conditions to keep the chalets in holiday use. The statement proposes:

  • a holiday occupancy condition barring use as anyone’s sole or principal residence
  • a centralised booking system and an occupancy register
  • recording of guests’ principal home addresses
  • making that register available to the council on request

The money the applicant is claiming

The planning statement sets out an illustrative forecast, which it stresses is not a guarantee of performance. It assumes 60% annual occupancy, an average tariff of £150 a night, an average party of 2.5 people and an average stay of 3.7 nights.

On those assumptions, the applicant says the site would produce:

  • about 7,008 occupied chalet nights a year
  • about £1,051,200 a year in booking revenue
  • about £1,965,081 a year in total visitor spending
  • about £913,881 a year spent by guests away from the site, in York and around it

The statement also claims the scheme could support activity equivalent to about 16 full-time-equivalent jobs. It is explicit that this is an economic-impact estimate and “not a commitment that 16 employees would be based permanently on the application site”.

Those figures are scaled from York’s tourism totals for 2024, which the statement gives as 9.4 million visitors, 1.7 million of them staying, an average stay of 3.3 nights, an economic impact of £2.01 billion and around 16,788 full-time-equivalent jobs.

Traffic on the A64

The transport statement, by Via Solutions, puts the chalets at 84 vehicle trips on a weekday and 85 at a weekend. The busiest hour is 11am to noon on a weekend, with three arrivals and five departures.

It also reports the collision record. The consultants found no personal injury collisions in the search area over the five years from 2020 to the end of 2024. Two collisions were logged near the access to a fish and chip restaurant about 400 metres south-west, which the statement says are not linked to this site.

Bus stops on the A64 are about two minutes’ walk away, served by Coastliner services 840 and 843. The statement says they give roughly two buses an hour into York from Monday to Saturday, and hourly on Sundays.

The first consultee has replied

Ten bodies were consulted on 20 August, including CYC Highways, the parish council, the Environment Agency, the Lead Local Flood Authority, National Highways, the council’s archaeologist and its trees and landscape team.

The first reply arrived on 25 August, from Foss (2008) Internal Drainage Board. The Board did not object, but it did take issue with the drainage numbers.

It notes the site is 1.5 hectares. At the greenfield run-off rate of 1.4 litres per second per hectare, that would allow 2.1 litres per second. The applicant is proposing 3.5 litres per second. The Board says it will accept 3.5 litres per second for surface water and treated effluent together, given the number of lodges, but it wants the drainage strategy amended to match before it comments further.

Water from the site would run through an existing system across the A64, into an ordinary watercourse on Forestry Commission land, and then into Old Foss Beck, which the Board maintains. The Board has asked for a condition requiring the drainage scheme to be approved before any work starts, with storage sized for a 1-in-30-year storm without surface flooding and no overland run-off in a 1-in-100-year storm, each with a 30% allowance for climate change.

What it means for you

If you want to comment, you have until Thursday 10 September. Comments go in through the application page on the council’s planning register, and they are published there.

A few things are worth knowing before you write. Objections carry weight only when they raise planning matters: Green Belt harm, highway safety, drainage, trees and ecology, and the effect on neighbours are all in scope. Loss of a view, or dislike of the applicant, are not.

This is a major application, so it is more likely than a householder case to be decided by councillors at a planning committee rather than by officers. No committee date has been set. The formal deadline for a decision is Monday 9 November 2026, though major applications frequently run past it by agreement.

The land next to the site, at Kingsmoor Plantation and Sandburn Wood, is identified as a Site of Importance for Nature Conservation. The site itself is in Flood Zone 1, the lowest flood risk band.

You can follow the case, and every other York application, on our York planning news page. Our roadworks and travel page tracks live closures on the A64 and elsewhere in the city.

Sources

Figures on the register are as published on 27 August 2026.