Less than four weeks after an application to determine if prior approval was required for a proposed agricultural storage building and without conducting a site visit, the case officer concluded that not only were no consultations required for this type of application, and that as the site was in a field to the North West of the holding, approximately 200m away from the closest residential building and not visible from any footpath or public vantage points, prior approval would not be required.

Had the application been advertised then local residents would have been able to alert officers to the fact that the proposed site was not only visible from the public footpath to the west but also from the lane running down from Diptford Cott to Broadley in the east.

The applicants’ agent had also misinformed LPA , saying that ‘The site for the building has been chosen to serve this 22 acre block of land as it is in a level corner of the field with an access track leading directly to it, with access to the whole of the site’. Had the case officer undertaken a site visit, or even taken a cursory look on Google Earth, it would have been obvious no such track existed. And had that happened the applicants might well have been asked why it was not possible to site the barn, supposedly necessary for agricultural purposes in the south east corner of the field, close to the point at which access is gained from the public highway.

Instead a track was now being constructed across the fields for which planning consent had not been obtained.

We concluded our letter of concern as follows:

The Society wish to know how you will resolve this failure, again look at the inadequacy of planning staff to do more analysis and questioning and rather less copying of representations which appears to be the case with this decision.

However it was not to be our only correspondence concerning activities on this site.