Hello again all. Just a quick note to let you know that Ofcom have now passed judgement. See our blog for more details…

and re the above – see my earlier post about the planning officer…

I wish I could say more about the nature of the “mistakes” which might help clarify things – unfortunately I cant at the moment…

Richlips – it sets several extremely dangerous precedents and I think the council are going to have some problems with that in the future. I can’t at the moment go into the full details of their interests – but from what is available wholly in the public domain – and bearing in mind the side issue of the involvement of Grand designs – do you think they would really want the house to have to be knocked down as a result of their cockup?

I would imagine that they felt it better to deal with the immediate crisis and worry about the precedents later…

sure you’ve thought about it but isn’t this the sort of thing where a judicial review can be used – but possibly impractical because of expense?

indeed – and bear in mind we threatened it first time around and SODC were forced to “reconsider”. If you are successful at JR – all that happens is the council are told to look a the decision again – and look what happened when we forced them to do that…

There are (with some exceptions) strict time limits for JR – and by the time we got to the 2nd planning committee meeting – bear in mind the money time and stress we had already expended. Thats what the Ombudsman is there for in part – so we’ll see what he has to say, although I think it will take some time for him to conclude his investigation.

you vote us in on the strength of our promises but we have no obligation to follow through on them”.

I don’t suppose you recorded this conversation? Fortunately, I did record our conversations with the council – and some of it is – shall we say – very interesting stuff! (and is with the investigators).

This kind of shit really gets my goat.

Pauly – as you can imagine – I’ve got through several herds of them already :) No really any way anyone can help directly with the council (except perhaps by spreading the word!) but if anyone feels very strongly about the way the programme presented the situation, you might like to consider a complaint to Channel 4. If you feel that is appropriate – it would be great if you could also indicate this on the polls on our blog.

Thanks again for all your support :)

The neighbours

I have to be a little careful here giving due respect to the ongoing investigation – and not wanting to bore you with the minutiae of planning detail that I have had to get into – but the following is all in the public domain so I can happily explain as far as I can:

The original planning officer made an on-site verbal agreement with him that she had no business to do – and did so without bothering to check whether what she was agreeing to was acceptable. When he had put his steel up, we noticed something wrong and complained (note we did not leave it until the house was up as both the programme and website imply). An enforcement investigation was started which led to a retrospective application which went to the planning committee (the one you saw on the programme). Unfortunately this same planning officer presented a false report to the committee and gave untruthful answers to committee members’ questions. You might have noticed everyone looking a bit uncomfortable at that meeting – this is because just before the bit you saw – in my five minutes, I had stood up and basically told the committee they were being lied to. They didn’t like that at all, and passed it unanimously.

Thats why we threatened a high court challenge (notice the programme didn’t explain that either).

The council were forced to “reconsider”…

fast forward to 18 months later – and despite our best efforts – it went back to committee (notice GD didn’t film that one) and – oh look – they passed it again – saying that it didn’t matter that it went against several of their planning policies – they thought it was fine and did no harm to us.

Now – when you consider the alternative – i.e. an episode of grand designs where the guy builds his house and then has to knock it down due to the council having ballsed it up – does it all start to fall into place?…

Incidentally – the planning officer referred to above no longer works for the council (but she very quickly got a job with a neighbouring council…)

I leave you to draw your own conclusions on that :)

Thanks Pauly – it’s not impossible but quite unlikely – trouble is once planning permission has been granted – no matter how corruptly – it in general can’t be taken away. But we’re doing as much as we can to try and make sure we are not left at a disadvantage through his and the council’s behaviour…

Thank you showerman! Actually we happen to agree with you about the pink thing – the previous owners did that for some inexplicable reason – we intend to sort that out when we have some time. You might be interested to know that it turns out our house looks the way it does (apart from the pink obviously) because the council insisted it be built that way back in 1980!

Re the comment on “if the neighbours blog is to be believed” – you don’t need to believe us – the council(!) did a survey and the results are publicly available if you are interested enough! :)

Just a quick thank you to the 350+ people from this site that have taken the trouble to look at our blog. We very much appreciate the support that many have shown us!

thanks again

The Neighbours :)