The Isle of Wight’s Planning Committee went into top gear Tuesday night in their condemnation of retrospective planning applications across the Island and in particular, Island property developer, Michael Jennings.
Readers of VentnorBlog may well be aware of the work of Michael Jennings as we’ve covered it a few times previously.
This all came about with the latest retrospective planning application for the development of St Joseph’s, Ventnor that came in front of the Planning Committee.
The St Joseph’s development has been on going for over two and a half years and importantly has been subject to numerous breaches of planning conditions, as well as retrospective planning applications (where the developer takes it upon themselves to develop the property in a different way to the planning permission that has been granted to them).
Once representations had been made by the planning department, the committee’s Chair opened the discussions up to the Planning Committee, made up of County Councillors.
“Clear contempt”
Cllr Muriel Miller was first out of the gate expressing her concerns at the “clear contempt of the developer of the planning process,” continuing with “it’s a virtual two fingers to the authority,” and concluding that she felt the retrospective planning application should be thrown out and the building should be “put back to how it was” when planning permission was originally given.
Cllr Scoccia was next to comment, saying that she endorsed what Cllr Miller had say, commenting that “it has been a nightmare and must have been a nightmare to live next door to.” (Disclosure: we live next door, and it has). Cllr Scoccia also questioning “how can it be for sale with this outstanding?”
Developers Taking Liberties
Head of Planning, Mr Murphy, said that he and his team “shared the frustrations of the councillors,” as it was a “particularly bad example,” labeling it, “one of the worst examples on the Island of developers doing what they please.”
Mr Murphy went on to detail how he had met with another Island developer who had built many sites on the Wight, which “May require demolition of buildings,” due to planning conditions being broken.
Clear Message Needed
Cllr Scoccia said she felt it was “Time that there’s a clear message,” sent to developers who don’t comply with granted planning permission.
Cllr Chapman interjected that they moved to agreed to the first of the planning officers recommendations, accepting the amended height of two of the rear buildings.
Next Cllr Burt got to speak, “I can’t believe that this can happen. It makes a laughing stock of us,” referring to the abuse of the planning process.
Seconding the proposal, Cllr Cunningham, agreed that the developer had “taken liberties.”
External Building Inspector Used
When a number of the councillors asked how this situation could have got to this point, Planning officer, Mr Pegram pointed out that the planning department had not inspected the site, as the developer had chosen to use an external building inspector to sign off the site.
The Chair took it to a vote with seven for the motion and four against, letting the increased building height go through.
No to Roof Garden For the Fourth Time
The next vote, an application to increase a parapet roof to allow a roof garden was rejected unanimously on the grounds of being out of keeping with conservation area and impacting on neighbouring property.
The officer recommendation in the report to Planning Committee, is to enforce putting this flat roof area beyond use, should be Committee refuse the application.
This will be the fourth rejection of using this space as a roof garden, including one by the Planning Inspectorate. Perhaps now Mr Jennings will grasp that he cannot use the space as a roof garden – raised parapet or not.
Paper C – Loads More Changes: Rejected
Those who thought that all of the fun was over, were mistaken.
A bundle of retrospective applications, covering changes to the position and type of windows, doors and external staircases, the change of position of a retaining wall from the original plans, the addition of four velux windows and the consideration of formal enforcement action to rectify some of these problems, came next.
The recommendation by the planning officers put forward was that the windows, doors and staircases should be accepted on the basis that they were minor.
However, the Planning Committee railed against this, insisting that the changes to windows left the building looking unbalanced, in contrast to the original plans.
To make the alterations clear for those viewing the plans, the windows and doors that had changed since the original planning consent were highlighted in green, making it abundantly clear how many alterations had been made.
Spot the Difference – Too Easy
Cllr Burt suggested that the difference between what had been built compared against the original plans “would never be able to be used in a spot the difference competition, as it would be too easy.”
So numerous were the changes, a suggestion was made by the Planning Head, Bill Murphy, to examine each of the four elevations individually was agreed to. Three of the four were rejected as the changes made the elevations unbalanced and the mixture of styles of the windows were unacceptable.
The votes were unanimous.
Raised Patio
Further votes were taken on the patio that had been created by a retaining wall being in a different position from the originally passed plans, on the basis of impact on the neighbouring property (rejected unanimously) – The velux windows were allowed to stay in place after the planning officer said he had been assured by the Architect that they just went into storage rooms.
Cllr Miller asked that the whole development be double-checked, from top to bottom to check that all of the buildings had been built as per the passed plans. To this several cheers of “Here, herehear, hear” came from the members of the Planning Committee.
A corner turned?
It really felt like a corner had been turned with the Planning Committee Tuesday night, not in their intention to have things done properly — we’ve heard many objections from them to retrospective planning permissions while we’ve been sitting in Planning Committee in the past — there appeared a new insistence from them to have the wrongs corrected.
Fortunately, this appears to be matched by a will from the planning department to execute enforcement.
Personal view
We’ve had to live next to the St Joseph’s development for close to three years and we’ve had to hold ourselves back from writing about it on VentnorBlog. Only when we felt the story has passed from personal to public interest have we penned a piece.
Over that time we’ve had to point out to the planning department the catalogue of problems with the site – not all of them, because we let many of them go, just because we got sick of the whole process.
Reflecting on Tuesday night we do feel vindicated. We were sure that there was something going seriously wrong … and it appears that the Planning Committee concur.
