Shortly before the meeting that refused the planning application for a wind turbine in Betty Haunt Lane, the council’s planning department changed their ‘conditional permission‘, to a refusal.
Actions like this can’t help but raise some interest, so we asked the Isle of Wight council for a comment from Bill Murphy, head of planning – given the amount of interest in the application and therefore its significance – but none came.
Council’s view
It’s uncertain why it was decided that Mr Murphy shouldn’t have his name attached to this, but instead we had the following from ‘an Isle of Wight Council spokesperson’:-
“On Monday afternoon we received an email from the applicant confirming that they would not be attending the planning meeting and that they would not be prepared to commit further funds to undertake noise assessment work as they felt that information already provided was sufficient.
“In light of this, officers had to base their recommendation on the noise information supplied by the applicant which showed the proposed turbine would exceed government guidelines for sound levels for such developments at the closest residential property.
“The recommendation was therefore changed to refusal for the sole reason of adverse noise impact and the applicants were advised of this before the meeting.”
Applicant: “Comfortable with what we had put in”
On The Wight put this to Sophie Taylor at Knight Frank, the agent for the planning application, who said, “We felt we had already provided the necessary information. We were comfortable with what we had put in already and we felt that addressed the issue.”
No decision on appeal
When asked if a decision had been made about an appeal, she said that no decision had been made as yet.
