Page 49 - All files for Planning Inspectorate update

It is also a fact that many of the objections to DM/18/1548 included in your rejection letter of 11
March are still applicable to the new proposal DM/19/1025 and we shall deal with them more fully
in a future submission. But for LA to characterise these matters as making “every effort to
incorporate the advice provide following the previous pre-application” is a travesty.

Section 4 of LA’s Statement goes into greater detail on the consultation event and (only some) of the
comments made there.

4.11 Attributed to one attendee - “The development is attractive.”

Notably this is the ONLY comment to this effect, and never make it to a formal submission to the
Council. More to the point not commented upon by LA are the many comments from attendees that
the development was unattractive, even brutalist, and excessive. Indeed the developer and the
Council spent the next ten months agreeing a multitude of changes to the development to make it
more palatable. Thus to use this one comment to describe the development as “attractive” is, at the
very least, misleading

For the sake of clarity, and as we have reiterated on a number of occasions, we acknowledge that
the principle of developing the site is attractive – clearly the detailed proposals that were submitted
as DM/18/1548 were anything but, and were eventually rightly rejected. We believe that these new
proposals also fall woefully short.

4.15 “General comments included that a new development of apartments would provide affordable
homes desperately needed by young and elderly people in the community”

DM/18/1548 did, indeed, contain a level of affordable housing. To quote this as a support for the
new DM/19/ 1025 is breathtaking hypocrisy given that all affordable housing has been dropped from
the new application.

During the May 2018 public meeting numerous other negative comments were made about both
the scale and the design of the then proposals by both some of our owners and other local residents.
These have been selectively ignored by LA in this statement.

We would also like to point out that DM/19/1025 is not a continuation of DM/18/1548 but a
completely new application and, as such, should have been put out for a further public meeting and
consultation before being lodged, as earlier confirmed to us in writing by yourself. The developer’s
failure to do this once again demonstrates their complete contempt for local opinion and the basic
requirements of the planning process.

Section 5 deals with the application process for DM/18/1548 and appears to be aimed at asserting
that the deficiencies in that application have been addressed in DM/19/1025.

To the contrary, the fact that the new proposals still display many of the deficiencies included in
your letter of 11 March rejecting DM/18/1548 indicates the extent to which the developer has
ignored many aspects of that consultation process. Indeed, given that they submitted the new
application only two days after you rejected the old one, it would have been a real achievement to
have taken all your objections into account. Clearly they had been working hard on DM/19/1025
long before they had received that rejection letter, so it is hardly surprising that all the points made
therein have not been addressed.