Encirc wants a 44 metre automated warehouse at Elton, near Ellesmere Port. It puts the build at £98m and the permanent jobs at 16. Comments close 8 October.

Encirc has applied to build an automated warehouse 44 metres high at its glass plant at Elton, and the application is now open for comment until Thursday 8 October.

The company puts the construction value at £98 million. It expects the finished building to support 16 extra permanent jobs.

That gap is not an oversight. The warehouse is designed to run with almost nobody in it. The planning statement says the building “will be highly automated and will require only a small number of staff on site, the majority of whom are expected to be existing employees”.

The application, reference 26/02766/FUL, was received on 1 September and validated on 15 September. It can be read in full on the council’s planning portal, where 54 documents are published.

Where it is

The Encirc plant is on Ash Road at Elton, in the Gowy Rural ward. The postal address reads Chester, but the site is about five kilometres east of Ellesmere Port town centre and half a kilometre north of Elton village itself. It sits in the industrial belt between Stanlow and Ince Marshes, next to Ince and Elton railway station.

The application site covers 4.04 hectares inside a landholding of more than 80 hectares.

What is proposed

The scheme is a warehouse in two parts, plus the equipment to move goods into the existing plant. The design and access statement gives the main building as roughly 200 metres long, 82 metres wide and 44 metres high, holding 12 crane aisles.

The application covers:

  • an automated warehouse of 16,805.4 square metres, the high bay, at about 44 metres
  • a low bay structure of 8,524 square metres, at about 13.3 metres
  • a covered despatch area of 5,587 square metres with loading bays
  • 2,271 square metres of mezzanine operational space and 666 square metres of mezzanine offices
  • an automated bridge link to the existing warehouse, 11 metres high, with 4.7 metres of clearance underneath
  • a service yard, an oversized pallet store, sprinkler tanks, substations and a new internal road

Total floorspace comes to 25,329.4 square metres.

Proposed heights at the Encirc site, Elton High bay warehouse 44 metres, low bay 13.3 metres, automated bridge link 11 metres. How tall each part would be Maximum heights given in the design and access statement, in metres High bay warehouse 44.0 Low bay warehouse 13.3 Automated bridge link 11.0 Clearance under the bridge 4.7 Source: Encirc design and access statement, application 26/02766/FUL Graphic by Chester Online

The jobs claim, read carefully

The planning statement sets out two very different sets of numbers, and the difference between them is the point.

During construction, which it puts at three years, the scheme is said to support about 122 direct construction jobs and 193 indirect and induced supply chain jobs, generating £32.35 million a year in gross value added.

Once it is running, the same document expects about 16 additional direct jobs and about 45 indirect and induced jobs, and £8.45 million a year in gross value added.

Those are the applicant’s own figures, submitted in support of the application. They have not been tested by the council.

For scale, Encirc’s Elton workforce is already more than 900 staff plus around 130 full time contractors, on a site that opened in 2005 and now produces about 2.2 billion glass bottles a year. The company joined the Spanish group Vidrala in 2015.

No extra lorries, the company says

Vehicle movements were one of the two questions residents raised at the company’s own consultation event in July. The answer in the application is that nothing changes.

The site already has consent for up to 912 HGV movements a day, granted under application 18/04948/S73. Encirc is not asking to vary that limit, and the planning statement says the warehouse will operate within it. No extra car parking is proposed either.

The other question was height. The company told the event that the high bay would be higher than the existing buildings on the site, but that it was “not expected to be particularly visible from Elton” because of where it sits inside the plant and the tree belts around it.

What happened before the application

The paperwork trail runs back to spring:

  • 23 March 2026: pre-application enquiry submitted to the council, reference 26/00538/PREAPP
  • 14 April 2026: a formal environmental impact assessment screening request, 26/01277/SCR
  • 1 June 2026: site visit and pre-application meeting with council officers
  • 15 and 16 July 2026: a consultation leaflet delivered to more than 1,500 properties in Ince and Elton
  • 22 July 2026: a public drop in event at Elton Community Centre, 4pm to 7pm
  • 12 August 2026: the company’s own comment deadline closes
  • 20 August 2026: the council confirms the scheme is not EIA development, so no environmental statement is required
  • 4 August 2026: written pre-application advice, which the applicant says found the warehouse acceptable in principle
  • 1 September 2026: application submitted

The planning statement records that no responses at all were received through the company’s consultation website, email or post. The formal council consultation, which is the one that goes on the file, runs until 8 October.

This is the second warehouse permission on the same land

Cheshire West already granted planning permission for an automated warehouse here on 13 January 2026, under reference 22/03693/FUL. The planning statement confirms that permission “has not been implemented”.

The earlier scheme included a driver welfare building, an HGV marshalling yard and a security building. The new one does not. It adds the covered despatch building and the oversized pallet store instead.

Demolition on the site is already under way and due to finish in November 2026. It was approved in two stages, in August 2025 and February 2026, and clears a control tower, an office block, workshops, chemical stores and a forklift garage left from the Encirc plant and the former Ince Power Station.

The applicant expects to have to sign a section 106 agreement covering off-site biodiversity net gain, because the site cannot deliver it all on its own land.

What it means for you

If you live in Elton, Ince or the villages around them, this is the point at which comments go on the public file.

  • Comment by Thursday 8 October 2026 on application 26/02766/FUL, through the planning portal. The site notice period runs to 7 October and the press advertisement period to 15 October.
  • Read the documents first. The landscape and visual assessment, the lighting assessment and the transport statement are the three that deal with what most people notice: how it looks, how it is lit at night and how the lorries move.
  • Planning cannot consider everything. Objections that carry weight relate to matters such as landscape and visual impact, highway safety, noise, lighting, ecology and drainage.
  • No decision date has been set. No committee date is listed on the file yet.

The site is 1.2 kilometres from the Mersey Estuary special protection area and Ramsar site, and 420 metres from the Ince conservation area, so consultation responses from statutory bodies will be worth watching on the file as they arrive.

You can follow other applications across the borough on our Chester planning news page, and we cover the wider industrial cluster in our report on the Peak Cluster pipeline through the borough and the anaerobic digestion plant proposed at Ellesmere Port.

Sources: Cheshire West and Chester Council planning portal, application 26/02766/FUL, including the application documents: Encirc planning statement prepared by Lichfields, dated 28 August 2026; design and access statement, August 2026; and the application dates.