Open meeting to consider deadlines for controversial site clearance
CONDITIONS on planning permission to convert two glasshouse sites into storage units and yards could become more open-ended after planners recommended that a two-month deadline to submit plans be scrapped.
After more than two years of talks, planning permission was granted in November to allow the change of use for Domarie and Avondale vineries in Oatlands Lane to create 16 storage units and two open yards.
The suggested changes include removing the six-month deadline to clear the site of all existing glasshouses and structures. Instead these would have to go within an approved timetable.
It would also get rid of a two-month deadline for a number of other conditions.
While this is the planners’ recommendation, the final decision will be taken by the Development & Planning Authority board at an open planning meeting. This will take place at 2.30pm at Beau Sejour on Wednesday.
There were tight time restrictions on drawing up plans for the removal and disposal of the existing structures, proposals to alter the driveway, ideas for the closure of the southern access, acoustic fencing details, planting scheme specifications and a waterway work scheme.
Rather than all these having to be done within two months of the decision, instead it is proposed that the details are supplied before any operations start on the site.
The original scheme caused a lot of concerns among neighbours, many of whom objected to the plans.
For the latest application there were three objections. One stated that after the level of concern raised previously, the applicant should strictly adhere to the current conditions. There were also worries about changing the conditions to be more open ended.
St Sampson’s constables did not comment specifically on the change of deadlines, but did question how the planners could effectively police all 22 conditions placed on the permission.
In their report, the planners said that as long as the conditions were met before the site was brought into use, it would fit with planning policies.
‘It is acknowledged that this would not place any pressure on the applicant to clear the site, improve the site access or to meet any of the other conditions within a particular time-frame, or indeed at all if the permission is not implemented,’ they noted.
‘The required information and works can however only be required in connection with the approved use, and there is no planning mechanism to require them to be implemented independently of that use.’
