Concerned councillors want a watchful eye kept on a new quarry near to The Belfry and Aston Villa's training ground despite giving it the green light.

Warwickshire County Council's regulatory committee voted without dissent to allow Burton-on-Trent-based Willshee's Aggregates to extract sand and gravel from 16.9 hectares of agricultural land to the west of Haunch Lane and east of Reindeer Park, Lea Marston, for the next eight years.

That is despite objections from the parish council and North Warwickshire Borough Council's environmental health team with county officials recommending approval with conditions to mitigate concerns over noise, dust, air quality, noise and the potential for lorries to rat run through residential areas.

Those restrictions include operation times of 7am until 6pm Monday to Friday with a window for essential maintenance only between 8am and noon on Saturdays.

No work can take place on Sundays or Bank Holidays.

There can also be no more than 240 lorry movements per day with a routing plan to avoid going through Lea Marston to be secured via a legal agreement compiled by the county's planning professionals.

Planning officer Neil Simpson noted how the bulk of the site had been allocated for this purpose and that "large areas" had been set aside at the edges to minimise impacts.

Shallow excavation, limited to two metres in depth, form part of the mitigation measures with each phase of restoration back to the current landscape programmed to begin as the next phase of extraction begins. Agreements are set to be negotiated to ensure further noise impact assessments are completed in line with a request from North Warwickshire Borough Council.

Committee member and the council's portfolio holder for transport and planning Councillor Stephen Shaw (Reform UK, Polesworth) insisted that robustly-enforced conditions would be "critical".

"We have had it with HS2 at Water Orton, bad smells and noise, residents are sick to the back teeth of it," he said.

"The contractor has to make sure everything is in place, if they start breaking (those conditions) there will be some very unhappy residents.

"It is very important for local people to have that assurance."

Mr Simpson replied: "They are pre-commencement conditions. There is nothing they can do to start without satisfying highways on the routing and the concerns of North Warwickshire's environmental health officers as well."

Cllr Adrian Warwick backed Cllr Shaw's stance.

"There is an awful lot going on in this area already, we can see that," he said.

"This is a shallow extraction, which is good to hear. Lea Marston is pretty swamped by what is already going on around it.

"I have more concerns about vehicles being kept to that routing plan than anything else. Provided they do, they won't affect residential properties, if they start straying off through the villages then we are going to have a problem."