Land at Garden Mill, Derby Road
In November 2021 the developer Blakesley Estates (Kingsbridge) Limited submitted a Section 73 planning application which wished, 'subject to the LPA’s approval'... 'create a new planning permission, including a new Condition 7, which approves Blakesley Estates’ revised plans for (i) access, (ii) appearance, (iii) layout and (iv) scale’.
In response the Society submitted an objection, arguing the application should not have been validated by the LPA as, in our opinion, the applicant was seeking to misuse Section 73 in order to extend the time allowed for the submission of a reserved matter, namely that of a revised layout. By our estimation all reserved matters applications needed to have been received by 4th June 2020.
The application had a target determination date of 24 March 2022. This was not met with the result that, less than a fortnight later on 6 April, the applicant had already prepared their statement of case to appeal the non-determination of their application. We subsequently submitted our own letter of representation to the appeal (The Society's Second Representation) responding to that statement of case.
The appeal began on 8 June with the LPA stating that, had the application been determined, it would have been refused.
In dismissing the appeal the Inspector concluded: 'In respect of the scheme’s inability to meet housing needs, it conflicts with the development plan... whilst I acknowledge the broad conformity of the scheme with a majority of other policies and some areas where the policy requirements would be exceeded, the main conflict is so material to the outcomes for the receiving community and the ability to make progress towards such key aims of the development plan that it renders the scheme in conflict with it, when taken as a whole.'
However the Inspector opted not to address our contention that the application was invalid as to had been submitted long after the last possible date. She did so because the supposed start date was now subject to a separate legal action and so did not wish to prejudice the outcome.