A crucial report into the delivery of a vital relief road in Chard won’t be published until the autumn.

The Chard eastern relief road is a crucial component of South Somerset District Council’s Local Plan and is intended to complement the delivery of new homes to the south and east of the town.

The need for the road was identified when the Local Plan was published in 2015, but to date not a single metre has been built despite numerous new housing developments in the town being approved.

A new report laying out options for how to proceed was expected to come before the council’s area west committee on Wednesday evening (July 20) for discussion.

But residents will now have to wait until September to have their say after council officers admitted the report wasn’t quite finished yet.

The road will stretch from the A358 Tatworth Road to the A30 Crewkerne Road, taking pressure off the existing ‘Convent Link’ junction where these two roads meet in the town centre.

Rather than building the road itself via central government grants or external borrowing, the council envisioned the road coming forward as part of housing developments within the Chard Eastern Development Area (CEDA), which will deliver up to 2,700 new homes, 17 hectares of employment land and two new primary schools.

Starting from the south, the road will begin at a new roundabout on the A358 and cross the B3162 Forton Road to the east of the existing houses.

It will then move north around the back of the Lordleaze Hotel, skirting the edge of the current employment units on Millfield and join up with the A30 to the east of a new research and development facility for Numatic, one of the town’s largest employers.

From there, improvements will be made to the existing roads on Oaklands Avenue and Touches Lane, with a new road cutting across Chaffcombe Lane (leading to Chard Reservoir) and rejoining the A358 near the junction with Thorndun Park Drive – near the planned site of a new 66-bed care home.

The report into the road’s future will now be considered by the area west committee on September 21, according to the council’s forward plan.

A spokesman said: “We are still in the process of completing the report, so that it can be as thorough as possible on this important issue when it is presented to ward members.”

Efforts to deliver developments within the CEDA – and thereby the ERR – have been repeatedly delayed, with council officers admitting in May 2021 that they would be willing for the different stages of the road to be built “out of order” as each site came on stream.

A decision on plans for 252 homes on the A358 – which would include the first stage of the road – has been repeatedly delayed, with concerns being raised about road safety, funding for new school places, how easily doctors’ surgeries can be expanded, and the ongoing phosphates crisis which is holding up the delivery of thousands of new homes across Somerset.

The council has declined to comment on whether any decision on this application will be taken before the ERR report comes to the area west committee in September.