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News and Comment August 2020

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15 August (Part 2) - Stalemate. Where next?

Concrete blockI have no idea why a property developer would build a massive concrete block on the boundary of Lesnes Abbey Wood and remove many trees without planning permission and expect to get away with it. I have even fewer ideas on why Bexley Council Planning Department would want to grant retrospective permission, albeit with one or two cosmetic changes.

Fortunately most of the Planning Committee Councillors are made of sterner stuff and chucked the application out five against two abstentions at their recent meeting. Most of them had in the past six weeks made a site visit and been suitably horrified. As some remarked, the CGI images provided did not tell the whole story.

Ward Councillor John Davey naturally spoke against the wrecking of the landscape but it fell to Councillor June Slaughter (Conservative, Sidcup) to put her finger on the real issue. Would we have permitted this scheme to go had the plans been submitted in a lawful way? she asked, to which the answer would seem to be a resounding No.

Amazingly Councillor Brian Bishop (Conservative, Barnehurst) was prepared to grant retrospective permission but couldn’t find anyone silly enough to second his proposal. Councillor Val Clark (Conservative. Falconwood & Welling) was a ditherer and both of them were the abstainers. Nothing short of complete restoration is going to be good enough in this case, anything else merely demonstrates that the rule of law stands for nothing in Bexley when an influential developer is involved.

 

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