PEOPLE living near a new housing estate will today plead with councillors to have part of the development demolished and moved.

Residents of homes bordering The Elms, in Spennymoor, are urging Sedgefield Borough Council to refuse a planning application that would approve changes to the original plans.

They will ask the council's development control committee to throw out the new application and order that four houses on the former Hardwick Depot site, off Carr Lane, be rebuilt further from their homes.

Construction company Bowey Homes was first granted planning permission to build 34 houses on the land in September 2002.

But it has been forced to reapply to alter the siting and design of four of the houses after complaints from residents whose homes back on to the properties.

Homeowners in Dundas Street were angered last summer when they realised the builders were raising the level of the ground before they built three-storey town houses near their homes.

They complained to the council, and the builders were asked to stop work until a decision was made about the site.

Margaret Eddy has lived in County House, a former police building, in Dundas Street, for 30 years, since her late husband, Peter, was a detective in the town.

Mrs Eddy, 70, said: "We did not object to the first plans, but these are much closer and bigger than suggested.

"The nearness and height of them will block light from our homes and overlook us.

"At the current height, my bedrooms are about level with the first floor. I do not want people in their kitchen or living room seeing into my upstairs.

"We are not against the development, just these four overbearing houses, which I hope councillors will ask to be pulled down, moved back in line with the rest of the estate and made smaller."

Bowey Homes has made a revised proposal to amend the design of the houses to two-storey houses.

A spokesman for Bowey Homes was unvailable for comment last night.

Planning officers have recommended that the new application be approved when the development control committee meets today at the council offices, in Spennymoor.