8 October - Incompetence or corruption? It’s impossible to be sure
A
prelude to this blog should have appeared earlier in the week but various things including
illness got in the way. It concerns the deferred
decision on the Crook Log Golf Pods which threatened to blight the lives of
South Gipsy Road residents with intense noise and light pollution, not to mention the adjacent Aspire SEND Academy.
I thought it was perhaps the most outrageous assault by planning application
that I had ever seen and one must thank the good sense of the Committee Chairman for backing the deferred decision.
Following that meeting
Reform UK officials took on the task of supporting the
residents who were relatively small in number and maybe overwhelmed by
officialdom. There were objections from the MP and elsewhere but Bexley
Council made none of them available so the Reform people undertook some more basic research.
They ended up with literally hundreds of pages of evidence suggesting that the
noise calculations were horribly wrong. The claim that the impact noise of club on ball would
hover around the 100dB mark were very wide of the mark. 130dB was not impossible
which bearing in mind the logarithmic nature of sound measurement puts the loudness into an entirely different and painful range.
Enquiries revealed that the applicant himself admitted that his noise calculations were flawed and the
figures submitted to Bexley Council were based on his own best guess. There was no evidence that the
Planning Officer had told the Committee Members that they were deciding the
future well-being of residents on the unscientific opinion of just one man.
Certainly there were no indications at the August meeting that Members were
aware of this vital fact.
The Reform objections went well beyond noise issues; Security,
Anti-Social Behaviour, Parking, Highway Safety, Lighting and Ecology were
all examined in great detail.
With no assurance that the situation was to be made absolutely clear to
Committee Members one of the Reform activists circulated his findings to
Planning Committee Members late last night.
By mid-afternoon today the Planning Officer had withdrawn his submission and
recommendation to grant permission from this evening’s meeting. It’s unlikely to be
pure coincidence. Recently I have
been balancing the probability of corruption against incompetence in planning
affairs. I am still not sure but this case shakes one’s confidence somewhat.