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A grandmother who has already taken Maidstone council to a Judicial Review once - and won - is preparing to do so again.
Solicitors acting for 69-year-old Patricia Shave have issued the borough council with a "proposed claim for judicial review" giving the council a final opportunity to remedy its alleged mistakes before she applies to the courts.
She wants the council to revisit the decision made on April 22 to grant planning permission for a holiday park of 18 "caravans" on an agricultural field off Stilebridge Lane in Marden.
Although the planning committee voted by the closest of margins to grant permission - six votes to five, with two abstentions - the permission has not yet been issued pending the submission of final details by the applicant, and Mrs Shave said there was therefore a small margin of time for the council to show common sense and reconsider, before both sides started to incur massive legal costs.
The first Judicial Review back in November, after the council had approved the scheme once before, cost her £37,338 in legal fees, a sum she feels was made worth it when the judge Mr Justice Holman quashed the decision and ruled that the council's planning officers had given the committee advice that "was wrong in law."
Following the judge's ruling, the council was obliged to consider the application over again - and was also ordered to pay Mrs Shave £18,699 towards her legal costs.
Although classified as 'caravans' in law, the proposed holiday lets will be timber-clad and have the appearance of lodges. Mrs Shave says they are effectively three-bedroom bungalows.
She said: "It's not just that I don't want it in my backyard - I don't - but it's also completely in the wrong area.
"If it were round the corner and out of my sight, I'd still object."
The holiday park is a "sensitive" area, close to a Site of Special Scientific Interest and with Ancient Woodland to the rear. It is also partly in a flood zone. Fifteen of Britain's 17 species of bat have been recorded in the area.
As it is, the holiday park lies on a field between her house and her neighbour, Paul Body, who has submitted the application.
Mr Body has already been using the field as a casual camping and caravanning spot, which has has been able to with permitted development rights.
Mrs Shave will see the holiday camp from her garden and from a bedroom in her house, a 300-year-old cottage where she has lived since 1993 and raised her three children.
She said: "You can't provide holiday accommodation and not expect that people will want to sit outside with their barbecues, playing music and having a drink in the evenings.
"There will be noise, smells and extra traffic."
The latter is a key worry for Mrs Shave.
She fears vehicles turning into the site will shine their headlights directly into the bedroom of the annexe that she has just had built for herself.
She is planning to move in there, and give up the main house to her grown-up daughter and her two children.
She said: "The whole thing has been upsetting from the start. There have just been so many things from the beginning that have been inaccurate."
She complains of incorrectly drawn plans, of statements saying that the flow in the drainage ditch outside the field took water away from her property northward towards the River Beult, when she knows full well from experience that it runs the other way, towards her home, and of the fact that experts engaged to check for great crested newts in the area did not even visit her own pond, just feet from the boundary of the holiday park.
It also aggravates her that her neighbour has chosen in his proposals to place the entrance drive, the bin store, and the sewage collection plant to service the holiday homes, close to her boundary, rather than on the other side of the field near to his own.
But perhaps her main fear is flooding.
An expert opinion submitted with the application suggests "the majority of the proposed development site would remain unaffected by flooding" - which the planning committee have taken to mean it's all right, but the flooding "exception" is the southwest corner, the point closest to Mrs Shave's home.
She said: "We have a regular problem with flooding, as do the three houses south of us.
"The water has never come in to the house because my door sills are raised, but there was an occasion earlier this year when it was just one centimetre from coming in.
"When they lay the hard-standing for these lodges and dig up the field and lay all the service pipes to the properties, it could be a disaster for me."
That is why she is determined to fight on no matter what the cost.
Fortunately, she has the support of her son Matthew, a businessman who runs his own yacht brokerage in Majorca, and who is prepared to put his hand in his pockets to help her.
He said: "We're fortunate to be in the position to take the council on. There's a lot of people who suffer from poor planning decisions who don't have the ability to do that. It must be even more frustrating for them.
"Of course, you shouldn't have to spend money to get justice, but the system is so weighted towards the developer. If their application is refused, they can appeal for no charge. If a resident loses her case, the only recourse is to the courts."
Mr Shave feels the council has paid scant regard to valid objections because councillors are so afraid of the cost if the developer appeals.
He said: "They would rather approve a bad application than risk an appeal."
He also suspects councillors felt they didn't need to pay too much attention to objectors to the Stilebridge Lane plan because there had been so few. He said: "This is a very small, rural community - only about 10 houses. Everyone - apart from the applicant - is opposed to the holiday park, but of course that is a very small number of votes for councillors to worry about."
He said: "It's also strange how partisan the decision was. Planning decisions should be apolitical, but the six councillors who voted to approve were all Lib Dems with one Independent, and the five against were all Conservative with one independent."
Mr Shave explained the complexities of the Judicial Review process. He said: "You can't challenge the judgement of the councillors, only the process in which they reached their decision. We believe that process was wrong.
"Both officers and the committee chairman tried to limit the discussion to the question of the design of the lodges, which was the issue that council had failed to address prior to the last Judicial Review.
"But that was wrong, they were at liberty to consider the whole application again and since the last application there had been a significant change - the Marden Neighbourhood Plan has been adopted and become part of the council's own planning policy and they should have properly considered that."
Marden Parish Council has confirmed that it views the holiday park to be in breach of the Neighbourhood Plan.
Mrs Shave, a widow with three children and two grandchildren, nodded in agreement. She said: "I don't understand it. There seemed to be such determination to see the application pushed through, there was no proper discussion allowed. I just got so cross watching."
Kingsley Smith are the solicitors acting for Mrs Shave.
In their letter to the council they allege: "It is very notable from the broadcast recording of the committee meeting that the committee chairman (Cllr Clive English) was anxious to confine the consideration of members to simply matters of the design of the caravans. This was incorrect in law; the committee’s planning judgment was confined in no such way and it was entitled to consider the application in the round, particularly given that the making of the Marden Neighbourhood Plan is a material change of circumstances relevant to the determination of the application.
"The chairman therefore acted to fetter the committee’s discretion."
The solicitors added: "The chairman's interactions with Cllr Parfitt-Reid were also inappropriate and displayed a lack of objectivity about the application.
"When she began to speak in order to refer to the highly material point about relevant policy in the Marden Neighbourhood Plan, the chairman spoke over her several times and in an impatient manner.
"It was clear to an objective observer that the chairman, being in favour of the application, was anxious to cut down further consideration of the unmeritorious aspects of the scheme."
In response Cllr English said: "Contrary to the allegation, I had absolutely no inclination one way or another on whether or not to grant the application.
My role in the discussion was limited to trying, correctly, to tease out any new matters in relation to planning policy or material considerations that may have arisen since the original decision and to take on board the design issue.
"It is correct that we discussed the design issue a lot, but then that was because the first judicial review said we should have considered it the first time, but we had not.
"I did not talk over or ignore Cllr Parfitt-Reid - I attempted to draw out from her how the new policies in the Marden Neighbourhood Plan might apply to the application.
"That is what would need to be done in order to sustain any potential ground of refusal relating to that plan and failure to do so would mean any such refusal would fall at appeal."
Maidstone council said: "Maidstone Borough Council has received a Pre-application Protocol Letter from solicitors acting on behalf of Mrs Shave challenging the committee’s resolution. The council’s legal team is reviewing the letter and the stated grounds which it will be responding to in due course."
Paul Nichols is the planning consultant from the Simpkins agency acting on behalf of the applicant Mr Body. He said: "This application in one form or another had been going on since 2019. My client has already done much more than would be normal on such an application, providing a detailed landscaping plan and drainage survey ahead of the committee decision, as well as giving a unilateral undertaking to forgo permitted development rights on half the site.
"If there were concerns over the positioning of the bin store or waste plant, the committee could have addressed those. They didn't. They voted to grant approval."
The Shave family are waiting to see whether the recent change of leadership at the borough council will make any difference. Since the recent elections, Conservative Cllr David Burton has become the new leader of the council.
Cllr Burton had spoken as a visiting member at the planning committee meeting, strongly urging the committee to refuse permission because the application contravened the Marden Neighbourhood Plan.
Readers can judge the issue for themselves by watching the council's webcast of the committee meeting here. The relevant discussion starts at 1hr 58 minutes (use the slider).
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