Derelict vinery sites do not set precedent

The director and company secretary of Island Development Ltd (‘Rule of Law prevailed on Les Blanches decision’, Open Lines, 2 December) really must attend some classes on logic and learn to read what is there, not just what he wants to see. Then, perhaps, he may eventually understand that just because the law allows something to happen, it doesn’t mean that it must happen.

If he were to read the preamble of Policy RH2, he will see that: ‘Where a need has been established by the Housing Department for specific forms of social housing, then the provisions of Policy RH2 may, at the Environment Department’s discretion, override those of Policy RH1.’ Note, Mr Grange, that the word is ‘may’, not ‘must’ or any other synonym. Note, also, the word ‘discretion’ is included. I’m not going to repeat its dictionary definition but it is a pity that you and the tribunal seem to think that its import as a word is so vanishingly small that it can be disregarded. The only mention of ‘discretion’ in the whole report is when the text of Policy RH2 is quoted. After that, nothing.

The two fundamental mistakes that the tribunal made were to ignore the ‘Elephant in the Room’ – the way the RAP defined all sites with glasshouses as being greenfield sites and the right of the authority members to use their discretion in deciding whether Policy RH2 superseded RH1 on a case by case basis.

Firstly, the RAP made no distinction between derelict vineries on heavily contaminated soil on the one hand and virgin, high quality, agricultural land on the other. The two are in every possible way very different. You don’t need to be an expert to see that and you don’t even need to be all that intelligent. But even so, it made no difference to the tribunal. The tribunal and the planners before them all had tunnel vision where ‘greenfield sites’ were concerned and refused to see the obvious absurdity exposed by Island Development’s proposal.

Mr Bumble may have been ‘the ignorant beadle of the workhouse’, but even he in his ignorance would with absolute justification be able to say that in this respect ‘the law is a ass’.

The professional planners and the tribunal wouldn’t recognise this patent absurdity but our elected representatives did. Because of the discretion that Policy RH2 allowed them, they were able to reject the patently absurd conclusion by the planning officers that the characteristics of the land did not preclude it being developed, thereby satisfying the first provision of Policy RH2.

While the tribunal quite rightly identified this basic error in the planning officers’ determination of the proposed development, it then bent over backwards to show that despite this howler it was still absolutely OK to develop the untouched high quality greenfield site at Les Blanches.

The tribunal’s case for this (based on evidence that was not introduced at the original hearing) was that there were six precedents of high quality greenfield sites in the rural area that had been used for social housing and that those precedents had to be followed to be fair to the appellants. Significantly, none of the proposals for these claimed precedents were determined by the elected politicians on the board but were determined by the planning officers alone.

The proposals to build were all, bar one, on sites with derelict glasshouses or had until fairly recently had glasshouses on them. Not one of the four reports (on the quality of the land) from the Agriculture, Countryside & Land Management Service (ACLMS) supported any of the developments but, as the developments were for social housing on derelict vinery sites, ACLMS decided not to oppose them.

All but one of those sites were presumed to have been high quality land before having glasshouses built on them and the Agricultural Reports suggested that after restoration and return to agricultural use the land might be ‘good or very good’ quality depending on the thoroughness of the restoration. From this the tribunal claimed that these developments set the precedent that untouched greenfield sites of the highest quality could be used for development. Importantly, the context of these reports was that the ACLMS was putting forward the case that derelict greenfield sites should be returned to agricultural use, not built on. The reports were, therefore, as optimistic as possible but even so the agricultural advisor who compiled the reports was not able to say that they could be restored to their original state. Consequently, the ACMLS did not, in any of these developments, mount any sort of opposition to the proposals beyond saying that it would prefer the land was not used for any sort of development.

The tribunal’s bland statement about the land’s return to agricultural use as high quality land exaggerates what restoration could achieve and was not supported by the ACLMS reports. Its purpose was to seal the claim that the land on the restored sites would have been the equal to the land at Les Blanches and so set the precedent that high quality land as found at Les Blanches should be treated in exactly the same way as these derelict vinery sites.

What is clear is that these sites do not set a precedent. Firstly, restoration is never 100% perfect and after restoration the quality of the land would still not be anywhere near as good as that at the untouched Les Blanches site. Secondly, the decisions to allow building on degraded greenfield sites were not properly tested by our elected representatives making the determination.

I personally believe that the board members would have allowed the developments on the degraded sites – it was something which objectors to this proposal had been suggesting as alternatives to Les Blanches from the word ‘Go’. If that had been the case, the tribunal and appellants would not have been able to claim them as precedents. The tribunal’s acceptance of the appellant’s assertion on this aspect of the appeal was wrong.

TONY LEE,

Les Salines, Le Vallon,

St Martin’s, GY4 6DN.