People living in a village near Bristol have asked Government ministers to intervene in a row over whether an American medi-tech corporation can build their European headquarters in the countryside between their homes and the edge of Bristol.
Long Ashton Parish Council has written to the Secretary of State Angela Rayner asking her to ‘call-in’ the planning permission awarded by councillors on North Somerset Council earlier this month, saying that allowing the development to go ahead goes against policies designed to protect the Green Belt around Bristol.
Campaigners in Long Ashton are now urging people to write to Ms Rayner – and copy in local Labour MP Sadik Al-Hassan – to urge them to get involved. If the Secretary of State does ‘call-in’ the application, she will look at whether North Somerset Council ’s decision was made in the right way, and whether the planning application should be revisited.
North Somerset councillors voted 8-5 to approve the plan earlier this month, after council planning officers recommended Epic’s plan be given permission. The planning officers said that although building on the Green Belt between Bristol and the village was against national policy, and would damage the principle of the Green Belt, the damage done to the environment and the future of the planning policies were outweighed by the positive economic impact of a large-scale high-tech business expanding into North Somerset.
The decision – and the way it was made in mid-January – so outraged Long Ashton’s Lib Dem councillor Ash Cartman that he resigned from the party group on North Somerset Council, claiming that it was ‘obvious’ some of his colleagues hadn’t even read the full report detailing the pros and cons of the planning application.
Epic says it will take 10 years to build their office campus on the fields between the south west corner of Bristol at Ashton Vale and the village of Long Ashton. The campus will have three office buildings, a separate restaurant facility and a 3,000-seater auditorium and lecture hall.
Epic has three different office buildings at various locations in Bristol city centre, as well as offices across Britain and Europe. The US-based firm wants to move all its Bristol employees to the proposed campus at Long Ashton, and create a European headquarters there.
Bristol City Council objected to the plan, telling North Somerset Council that as well as damaging the principle of the Green Belt around the city, there were other, less damaging, locations around Bristol that Epic could look at as an alternative.
Now, in the five-page letter to the Secretary of State, Dan Smith, the chair of Long Ashton Parish Council outlines in detail the issues in the planning application, pointing out that a widespread consultation across the village found 96 per cent of residents were against the development.
“Objections have also been lodged by an unusually high number of statutory bodies, including Historic England, highlighting the significant and irreparable harm this development would cause to the green belt, national and local heritage, landscape, environment, and agricultural land,” he said.
“The application raises significant issues of national importance, namely that it conflicts with National Planning Policies (NPPF) on making the best use of land as it fails to follow a sequential approach to land selection contrary to planning guidance on sustainable development and the policy set out on town centres and the Green Belt,” he added.
“We contend that the application represents a complete departure from the NPPF,” he said. “It is also in direct conflict with the Draft North Somerset Local Plan as a whole. The application is particularly controversial, to the extent that Bristol City Council object to it. To proceed without further review and rigorous scrutiny would seriously undermine confidence in the planning system at both national and local level,” he added
“Epic has stated that if it does not relocate to this site, it cannot remain at its existing three offices within Bristol City Centre and will vacate the city centre and indeed the country. However, well established national planning policies should not be cast aside in response to the threats of individual companies, particularly where, with some flexibility, they could be accommodated on other sites with considerably less impact,” he told Angela Rayner.
What does a ‘call-in’ mean?
Ministers have the power to send the application to a planning inspector to hold a public inquiry to consider the decision again, but it is a power they rarely use. In other cases in Bristol, appeals to Government ministers to call-in applications after they have been given permission have failed.
Previous Local Government minister Michael Gove ultimately refused to look again at the permission given to build 260 homes on Brislington Meadows, and more than 800 flats on the site of the Broadwalk shopping centre in Knowle.
The letter to the Secretary of State is the first of two ways remaining for Long Ashton to challenge and eventually overturn the planning permission given – the other is a potential Judicial Review, in which members of the public can challenge the way in which a council awarded planning permission in the courts.
This is an avenue currently being pursued by campaigners trying to challenge Bristol City Council’s decision to award planning permission for the redevelopment of Bristol Zoo, and in Knowle, a community-funded Judicial Review challenge resulted in the developers and campaigners agreeing to go back to the drawing board with the entire plan, rather than continue to court.