As the proposed developer for Home Farm, Bellway Homes has a dubious track record with a string of fines for poor practice and many unhappy customers.
The Bellway Homes Unhappy Customers Facebook page has over 3000 members! As seen on TV, is usually a mark of quality, but not in this case. Bellway homes featured on the BBC website. Many complaints surround the Bassingbourn Fields estate in Cambridgeshire. In 2024 a resident told the BBC of “more than two years of chaos and no end of snags”.
In 2016 Bellway Homes were handed a “black mark against their environmental sustainability claims” when fined for alterations to the protective fencing that was shielding the root protection area of an established oak tree enabling digging around the roots, which had exposed and broken a number of them. They were also fined for a lack of wheel washing facilities, which had resulted in mud on the road, affecting highway safety. A Yate Councillor, Chris Willmore said the fine was ‘pathetic’ and ‘no real deterrent’ and indeed Bellway would be in hot water again.
Another fine was gained in 2108 when Severn Trent prosecuted Bellway Homes over illegal standpipe use. Severn Trent successfully prosecuted Bellway Homes for two counts of illegal standpipe use at a new housing development on Loughborough Road, in Thringstone, Leicestershire. However Bellway were illegally at it again, twice more, in Buckinghamshire. This time it was Thames Water on the prosecution warpath and Bellway Homes was fined £10,115 for connecting to an unauthorised and unlicenced standpipe on two separate occasions at developments in Greenhithe and Taplow.
Bellway were also previously involved in the controversial practice of bird netting as reported in a site near Wrexham in 2019. Whilst not illegal, this practice has been heavily criticised by the RSPB.
More seriously, Bellway Homes also has held the dubious honor of the largest penalty a court has ever handed out for a wildlife crime when they were fined £600,000 in 2020 for destroying a bat roost at a construction site in Greenwich in 2018. The company pleaded guilty to the offense, which took place during the bats’ breeding season as reported on the website of the Chartered Institute of Building.
Unlucky Bellway Homes were fined again in 2023 and ordered to pay £100,000 to northeast environmental charities after dumping contaminated soil on one of its sites in Northumberland. As reported in the Construction Index, “Bellway Homes imported waste soil – containing wood, metal, wire cables, rubber, plastic and vehicle tyres – on to its St Mary’s Park housing development near Stannington”.
In 2024, Bellway Homes have broken promises on community infrastructure and affordable homes at a site at Shoebury Garrison near Southend. According to reports in the local paper “Initial plans included a health centre and pharmacy, as well as business units to create 40 new jobs, but all these elements have already been removed.” and “the developer has now submitted a change of planning permission to Southend Council claiming the scheme “cannot support the provision of any affordable homes” despite the plan initially including 65” .
And Bellway has been investigated for anti-competitive behaviour. It was one of the eight major house builders named in an investigation opened in 2024 by the Competition and Markets Authority into “anti-competitive behaviour”. An update in October 2025 formally closed the investigation with commitments by the developers to pay £100m to affordable housing programmes to address the regulator’s concerns along with a range of other safeguards. Under the terms of the offered commitments, Bellway will contribute £13.5m to the total. Bellway state “Bellway’s offer of commitments does not constitute an admission of any wrongdoing”! Their settlement is just slightly more than the settlement Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor paid out to Virginia Giuffre.
If the Home Farm development goes ahead, Warminster residents will have to live with whatever Bellway end up building and how ever they go about it…