Residents celebrate planning victory

RESIDENTS are celebrating a planning victory after developers saw their application for four homes on greenfield land adjacent to the historic Culcheth Hall Farm Barns rejected – despite Warrington council planners recommending that it be approved.
Borough councillors Matt Smith and Chris Vobe made strong representations to the Council’s development management committee against the proposals.
The committee also heard from a local resident and from representatives of Culcheth and Glazebury Parish Council.
In their submission, Cllrs Smith and Vobe said: “The developers suggest they have taken on board comments made by the current residents and made changes.
“This is rather disingenuous, as pre-application the residents had only been consulted on the relocation of their bin store, not the proposed development of four houses.”
“The proposals extend the development of this greenfield site to the North and East, towards the greenbelt. We should not describe this as infill development.”
They went on to challenge the Council’s determination that the unadopted road, by which the properties would be accessed, was wide enough to accommodate the traffic that would be generated. They argued it was below the required minimum width and provided photographs to support their argument.
The two Culcheth councillors had taken their own tape measure on site to measure the narrowest point!
During the discussions, the meeting was adjourned when committee members reacted angrily to the news that the majority of current Culcheth Hall Farm Barns residents have a restrictive covenant in their leases which prevents them from objecting to any building work which the freeholders – developer August Blake -carry out on the site. Legal opinion suggested that the covenant may be unenforceable, since the right to comment on any planning application is enshrined in law. Nevertheless, it was reasonable to assume that many residents would be unaware of this and had chosen to abide by the covenant. Committee members believed that there may have been a case for postponing the decision and re-opening the consultation.
Chairman Tony McCarthy allowed residents to decide for themselves if they wished the committee to consider deferral – after a short break, Cllr Vobe reported that they had considered the issue, but would prefer the committee to proceed.
The committee unanimously voted to reject the application, on a variety of grounds, including the impact on the openness of the Green Belt.
Speaking after the meeting, Cllr Vobe said: “We were very pleased to support residents of Withington Avenue and Culcheth Hall Farm Barns at tonight’s planning meeting and we are equally delighted at the result.
“Protection of green fields and green belt land in our village is close to the hearts of many local people. That is one of the reasons that this application was so strongly contested by the Culcheth community.”
Cllr Smith added:“This result is a victory for common sense. It was very clear that a number of factors needed to be taken into consideration, including the access road, the increase in traffic along a narrow road, the impact on the street scene and the openness of the adjoining green belt.
“We are pleased that the committee rejected the officers’ recommendation and were persuaded by the strong arguments put forward by local people.”