After a five-year battle to build a much-needed care home in Poole, permission has been granted on appeal.

The struggle has been waged over the old Poole Pottery factory site in Sopers Lane since 2006.

Poole planners continually turned down proposals by developer Metnor to build a care home – refusing four in four years.

Despite scaling down the size from 100 beds to 80, Borough of Poole still deemed it overbearing and used the allocation of the site as vital brownfield land for jobs to block the plans.

However, planning inspector Sian Worden, who held a four-day inquiry at the beginning of April has sided with the applicant and granted planning permission for an 80-bed care home.

In association with operator, Care UK, the appellant had been searching for a suitable site for a new care home since 2005 and this one would provide around 70 jobs and include residents with dementia.

The inspector’s report said: “Given the scale of available land, were the proposal not consistent with Poole Core Strategy policies, the loss of slightly less than a hectare of employment land at the appeal site would be neither here nor there.”

The council raised a concern that the presence of the home would constrain future employment uses on adjacent sites but the inspector found the proposed home had been designed and laid out to minimise the impact of potential noise from neighbouring uses.

Conditions were imposed, agreed between the parties, to protect the appearance of the building and surrounding area, and the privacy of neighbouring occupiers.

Metnor declined to comment on the outcome of their appeal.