Tag Archives: Planning permission

ROOTS ALLOTMENTS – OH DEER

Private allotments at Leigh Woods killed Bambi

Lucky families out walking at Leigh Woods on Boxing day were treated to the sight of a deer caught in a fence with flesh ripped off its leg right down to the bone.

The fence was around new allotments run by for-profit company, Allotta Futureland Ltd, trading as old friends Roots Allotments. This controversial company’s private allotment site sits between two SSRIs full of wild deer.

Roots Allotments’ fence is far too low to keep deer from trying to jump it. If it was larger they’d have to apply for planning permission, including a full environmental impact assessment. Something Roots are avoiding by claiming their allotments are “agricultural use”.

As the fence is low, deer try to get over it but misjudge it because it’s made of thin cheap wire that the deer can’t quite see.

The deer on Boxing Day suffered. Flesh was ripped from its leg down to the bone by its own weight. Members of the public had to use wire cutters to cut it out and then humanely euthanise it with the help of a vet as its leg was totally destroyed.

Roots Allotments list their aims as “improve biodiversity”, “build community” and “create good vibes”.

PRIVATE EQUITY CASHING IN ON ‘HOUSING CRISIS’

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The quick sale of Kier’s half-finished ‘Urban Quarter’ development on Hengrove Lane, adjacent to Hengrove Leisure Centre to Terra Firma, a European private equity outfit, operating under the brand Tilia spells trouble for locals and increased profit for financiers.

The first thing Terra Firma have done is go back to Bristol City Council to alter the planning permission. Their request? That they can add two storeys to a couple of the proposed blocks of flats there.

While this will increase the amount of people and vehicles on a crowded site, it will also increase profits for a shadowy group from Europe’s financial elite.

This is also, of course, a profitable little private equity trick that can be pulled off elsewhere in South Bristol where the amount of unsustainable housing development on their open space, accompanied by few new public services or facilities, already has locals up in arms.

The housing crisis is turning out to be a nice little earner for some isn’t it? And a new kind of hell for others.

NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY IN SOUTH BRISTOL?

PROPERTY BOSS’S DORMER TRAUMA

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Dickie’s unobtrusive dormer window – no planning permission required?

Richard “The Builder” Fear, Service Manager (Property) Assets at Bristol City Council, characterises the new breed of smarmy, arrogant, overpaid oafs running our council these days.

For some reason Rich the Builder has decided to install an “upscale dormer window” at his poncy period gaff in Haverstock Road in upmarket Knowle without bothering to apply for planning permission! Does this member of Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and leading council property “expert”, struggling to get by on about £60k a year, think that planning permission is only for the little people?

Possibly. Although Fear’s long-suffering neighbours take a different view. So the overpaid and underperforming tosspot – whose department currently has a £9m hole in its budget being plugged by redundancies to decent low paid staff providing an actual service to us – is having to apply for retrospective planning permission on what one nearby resident describes as “a huge property extension that blatantly overlooks his neighbours, not a fucking dormer window.”

Should Fear’s retrospective planning bid fail – as it should – then he’ll have to pull the whole thing down. If it succeeds then Bristol City Council will be having to explain away another conflict of interest from this senior property boss.

Because we also note that Rich the Builder ran his own business – ‘Corporate Property Insight Ltd’ – from his Haverstock Road address between 2013 and 2015 while he was a senior employee of the city council making major decisions about our property assets.

How many conflicts of interest is one council boss allowed?

DAYLIGHT ROBBERY?

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Why would the wealthy and well-connected need planning permission to build this?

Our dear old friends Mordaunt and Ord, that pair of dubious MERCHANT VENTURERS running the BRISTOL PORT COMPANY at Avonmouth, are at it again. Pissing off the locals and paying scant attention to the law while Bristol City Council and regulators attempt to look the other way.

So step forward the DAY GROUP who Mordaunt and Ord have allowed to start building a BOTTOM ASH manufacturing plant in the port grounds without either organisation recognising the need to get, er, planning permission. Is planning permission only for the little people now?

Instead, it seems, our old friend, bent council planning officer Angelo “King Pawn” Calabrese appeared to give the Day Group the nod in August 2015 to build their POLLUTING manufacturing plant – where TOXIC remains from waste incineration will be made into asphalt blocks for road building – within yards of people’s homes. However, the King Prawn actually issued a ‘PLANNING CONTROL NOTICE’ that formally registers a change of land use, not planning permission.

Day Group and the Bristol Port Company are now relying on ‘PERMITTED DEVELOPMENT RIGHTS’. Legislation that allows ports in the UK to undertake development without planning permission on their land for the purposes of shipping or for dock-related activities such as loading, unloading or transporting goods . A manufacturing plant working with toxic material run by a third party is, of course, under NO DEFINITION a docks-related project.

And Bristol City Council have already admitted as much. In a letter sent to the Bristol Port Company on 3 September 2015, just days after apparently allowing the plant to go ahead, King Prawn’s boss Paul “HOT” Chick told the port in plain English and in no uncertain terms, “With reference to [..] ‘Permitted Development’ provisions it is clear that industrial operations ARE NOT included.”

So now, in November 2016, how come this plant with NO PLANNING PERMISSION is nearing completion on docks land? However, thanks to the persistence of Avonmouth residents the council has been forced to issue a PLANNING ENFORCEMENT NOTICE, which should result in the companies, at least, having to obtain retrospective planning permission. Although residents are demanding a STOP NOTICE from Bristol City Council and have called on the EA to SUSPEND their ongoing licensing process for the plant until the case has been decided.

Arguments for ceasing the development are sound when you consider that bottom ash is the TOXIC REMAINS of incinerated materials, which could include heavy metals such as Lead, Copper, Zinc and Barium. While batches tested in the Environment Agency’s (EA) own studies contain as many as 73 different tasty and nutritious ingredients. Why not test the EA’s claim that Bottom Ash is inert and non-hazardous by throwing a lump of it in your fishtank or by licking it?

It’ll be interesting to see, then, how the port, Day Group, the council and the Environment Agency wriggle out of this one so tthat hey can continue their mission to poison the residents of Avonmouth

The BRISTOLIAN

“Smiter of the High and Mighty”