Council tells Bagby to rip up runway
 

A friend who flies from Bagby tells me the local council have issued a planning enforcement notice, telling the owners to take down a hangar, rip up the reinforcement matting on the grass runway and also dig up a small (about 20 yards long) stretch of concrete taxiway which crosses the main runway about half way down. If they have to do this, it will cause chaos there, and massively reduce the runway's usability in winter (it waterlogs, evidently).

What possible concern of a council can runway matting be ? This is of the type where the grass grows through, and you can't even see it unless you're stood on it !

I can only assume that their objection would be that the matting would make the airfield more usable and safe for the residents ... and they wouldn't want that, would they ?

Well done planners, protecting the community once again ... :ugh:

maybe he should tell the pathetic council to take a hike :mad: who do these twats think they are God? It makes me sick reading totally senseless directives made by a bunch of people abusing their power and trying to elimate our freedom. I hope this is fought to the death.

Pace

I would suggest they make a call to AOPA and Peter Kember.

Hambleton planning authority are well known to have amongst their number, incompetents. This was shown a few years ago when they proposed to grant planning authority on what is known to be a flood plain and which, is incorporated into proposed flood relief measures as such - a flood plain. Perhaps a survey showing the potential increase in risk to aviators using Bagby for which ultimately, the planning decision might potentially be responsible as a consequence, might help?

Totally ridiculous, clearly some local NIMBY [Bagby is full of them and known for it] has created mischief. However, the owner of the site is no dummy and more than able to deal with this. I wonder if this has a bearing on the plans for improvement?

Best Wishes

The Council's decision to refuse the planning application to lay the runway reinforcement, and the reasons behind this can be viewed at:

PublicAccess v7.4 @ Hambleton District Council: Application Details (09/00231/FUL)

You'll have to click on the Associated Documents tab, and then the View Associtated Document button, and then select the Decision Notice and click the View button.

The council thought that a reinforced runway would increase the number of movements at the airfield and that this would adversely affect the amenity of the local residents. (I'm pretty sure the impact on the number of movement would be minimal because the based pilots probably can't afford to fly more often, so it would only affect the number of visiting pilots.)

There were various other reasons why the planning application was refused. These can also be seen in the same document.

According to the Hambleton District Council Planning website, the Application is under appeal, and no final decision has been announced, so I find it suprising that the Council would seek to enforce a planning notice while this was the case.

I wish the owner good luck with his application. He has obviously tried to address local concerns and work with his neighbours rather than against them. The council's decision is challengable on a number of points, including the noise survey that shows there would be negligible impact on the amenity to local residents!

BTW: The original planning consent in 1980 approved flight movements of 80 movement per week (1 takeoff + 1 landing = 2 movemenets). According to the noise survey the number of flights taking place at the airfield has been significantly higher in recent years and is currently estimated to be about 200 movements. However, the noise survey suggests that more than half the movements that took place on the day of them survey didn't even registered above the background noise!

tp

Where is the logic of elected officials closing down or attempting to close down a business that supplies employment and revenue in a rural area?

Will council officers be held to account for squandering of public money pursuing frivolous and misguided proceedings, just like they did, (spectacularly unsuccessfully) against Kemble.

With any luck Hambleton District council will be as farcically incompetent as Cotswold DC and N Wilts District council were! :rolleyes:

I would have thought it was easy to show that reinforcing the runway has demonstrable safety benefits. Surely the council would not want to be seen to be doing anything to compromise SAFETY would they!?

It depends how much the applicant is taking the ****.

If they've applied for permission for something, and been turned down, and then gone and built it anyway, then the answer to "how much" is "a lot". It would be perfectly in order for the council to issue an enforcement notice.

In fact it's not that unusual for all the following to be in progress at once:

(1) An original application, which has been turned down, and is now under appeal.

(2) An enforcement notice, which is also under appeal.

(3) A new, retrospective, application.

The point is that an applicant who is taking the **** cannot put off enforcement forever just by, for example, putting in an endless string of repetitive retrospective applications, appealing each one, and them claiming enforcement should not occur "because our application is under appeal".

There is, unfortunately, no way in law to stop a silly series of repetitive applications, provided the applicant is willing to pay the fees for each one, so sometimes you have no remaining options but to go for enforcement.

That'll be up to the appeal inspector and then the local government ombudsman.

If he decides that the council's decision was completely haywire, and had no reasonable basis, the appeal inspector can award costs against the applicant. You could them complain to the ombudsman and try to get him to go after the councillors (with, I suspect, limited propsect of success).

If on the other hand the appeal inspector decides that the council made a reasonable decision, but he happens to have come to a different reasonable decision and allows the appeal, he will make no order for costs and no complaint to the ombudsman has any chance at all.

Those are not reasons in planning law that can be taken into account when considering a planning application.

The answer to your question is thus "planning law (like, in fact, any other law) is not based on, and does not have to obey, logic".

I went to the original planning meeting and you've never seen a bigger bunch of misinformed oldies that is the Hambleton planning committee.

The questions and issues they raised were on the whole, ridiculous. The ripping up of the safety enhancing plastic runway reinforcing is just one example. :mad:

Strikes me as odd that planning permission is required in the first place for the concealed runway matting.

Before - A strip of mown grass

After - A strip of mown grass:ugh:

The offending hangar is of course another matter I suppose.

It doesn't matter whether or not they were ridiculous. What matters is whether or not they were valid reasons for refusal under planning law - if they weren't, the appeal will succeed.

A really bizarre feature of the planning system, by the way, is that if you build something illegally and then apply for retrospective permission then the fact that you're trying to take the **** out of the system is not, by law, held against you. Your application has to be considered on its merits, regardless of the fact that you've decided to stick two fingers up to the law and the local community and build illegally.

[All my comments in this thread are by way of providing background information on the way the planning system works, as this is widely misunderstood; I am not making any comment on this particular site as I know nothing about it.]

Planners simply don't understand small aerodromes and their advisers don't trouble to study ICAO and ANO definitions. In the fact the planning system is a dog's breakfast and needs reform.

Planners tend to be guided by government policy, guidance notes and the dedicated following of fashion. Reasoned argument rather passes them by in my experience.

Sometimes Councillors are better and sometimes worse!

Well, you get the councillors you deserve, don't you.

And most people deserve nothing at all, as they can be ****** neither to vote in local elections nor (if they don't like any of the candidates) to stand for election themselves.

At the risk of wandering off topic, this isn't quite true. Since central government controls so much of what local government does, there is little incentive for anyone with serious capability to take part. The average committee meeting makes you weep with frustration at the trivial nature of both the agenda and the debate.

Local councils no longer control their affairs to any significant degree and that's been true since the disastrous Redcliffe Maud recommendations implemented in 1974 and made progressively worse since:mad:

Well yes there is an element of truth in that. But if you come to my committee on Tuesday you'll find that the agenda is not entirely trivial. Whether the debate is trivial, of course, is back to the quality of the councillors, particularly the opposition - the opposition lead on the committee I chair is intelligent and knowledgeable and the debate is usually useful and constructive.

There is something that i deeply dislike about this thread.....

A lack of facts for one, on how the hanger and grass reinforcement came to be there in the first place
An attitude of agression towards the council.

So, does somebody want to volunteer all the facts from start to finish rather than "bash" the other side, because I feel for sure the tone of this thread will do nothing to help future just battles.

I couldn't agree more. The way the process seems to be structured, only "certain kinds" of people are going to get involved. But that is politics on the larger scale, too. It is totally true that we get the politicans we deserve, but who set up the framework?

What interests me is why the (I presume) green plastic grass reinforcement is in breach of planning regs.

I don't know if they used the overt plastic matting (which lies on the surface) or the pretty well covert sort which - after a year or two of grass growing - is very hard to spot and would eventually disappear altogether under a layer of soil.

Just how much surface improvement is one allowed?

Would one be prohibited from mole draining a runway (dig a ditch alongside and drill a load of tunnels under the runway which will drain water into the ditch)? That would potentially greatly increase the utility and thus increase the movements. The ditch could be covered with slabs, so if somebody goes off the runway they don't wreck their plane.

Building a hangar without a planning permission is of course just foolish - unless you are happy to take a chance on it being undiscovered for the 4 years or whatever...

vanHorck; you'll find that most English councils are comprised of idiotic, self-important, disconnected cretins. That, I'm afraid, is a simple fact of life. People with the skills to discharge such a role with any kind of competency are off earning good money elsewhere. Those same people are unfortunately usually also totally apathetic to the idiots who sit on local councils and their crackpot policies..... until their pet hobby starts getting undue attention.

I've been into Bagby a few times. If noone had told me about the runway matting I never would have known. You can't see it, although you can sure as hell tell when you taxi onto an unmatted section (ie. down the bottom of the hill) during wet periods!

I can assure you that Mr vanhorck's councils are every bit as bad as those we have to suffer in the UK.

Eh??? So are plenty of councillors, like me. Being a councillor is something that many people manage to do in their spare time from a full-time job.

Gertrude the Wombat, you've been around the forum long enough to realise there are a lot of armchair views, but actually standing up and doing something to make a change whether its being a local councillor or being on the schools governers for your children is where you can make the difference with your views!

Good for you. However unfortunately I doubt you're on Bagby's local council. I used to live up that way and they truly are a shower of shít. They are incapable of identifying with anyone who has interests which are outside their wax jacket and home-made-jam borg collective field of social vision; exactly the kind of closed-minded people who should be specifically prohibited from such positions.

I know several of our local councillors. The are eminently sensible folk (I worked with some of them before I retired from paid employ). However, they are seriously limited in what they can do. Guvmint reserves a lot of the authority to itself - or so it appears.

We want to build a new Church in a rural location to replace one that is based round a WW1 army hut that is now falling apart. Since the new one is greater in cubic capacity than the old one, and is on green belt land, the council is pretty much compelled to refuse permission, even though all councillors are in favour. Then we appeal, and expect to get consent on appeal.

An "interesting" process! The councillors clearly aren't trusted by Guvmint to make decisions.

Mind you, having seen some of the wacky decisions (refer above) made by councillors elsewhere, I can see why that is. Maybe the whole process needs overhaul. I'm too busy right now to give it the attention it deserves, so is anyone else up to sorting it with the Civil Service?

What about your boss?;)

Sorry:)

Keef will be back....;)

I strongly suspect that the real muppet councillors are in the "countryside" councils. I live under one of these and have met the people concerned, and most of them are either crooks or idiots.

One councillor (a Cons one) was phoning up locals in the village, the evening before the committee hearing, asking them to come along and object. Had this call got taped, he would have been in big trouble. Yet this seems commonplace. Another one (this time the Chairman) has been using certain trade connections to interfere with local architects (who obviously prepare most of the planning applications).

And it is in the countryside locations that strip owners will have the most trouble...

It's all very well saying one should stand for the committee (a sentiment I obviously agree with) but only another muppet with under the table ambitions will want to do this kind of job. One would need to replace the whole committee in one go.

Sounds a bit bizarre. Whilst "public speaking rights on planning applications" is in general a Good Thing(TM), there do need to be some rules. On my council the rule is that if you've put in a written objection in time then you may speak against, provided that you give notice, again in time, of your intention to speak. (That's notice to officers, of course, not councillors.) "The night before" is far too late for both.

There is, by the way, nothing wrong with a councillor campaigning either for or against a planning application, provided either that they're not a member of the committee or that they declare at the meeting that they're taking sides and withdraw from the room whilst the application is discussed and voted on. The rules about how much they're allowed to lobby their mates on the committee in private before the meeting are a little unclear, but it's absolutely clear that it's completely illegal for their mates to make their minds up before the meeting, or for there to be a party whip.

When either applicants or objectors ask me for my support I point out to them that if I were to offer them my support they wouldn't get my vote, as by law I'd have to leave the room whilst the application they're interested in is discussed. At this point most people decide that they don't after all want me to declare for their side in advance and are happy just to make sure that I understand their point of view.

Local councillors in Holland are no better, just for your info. Yes it is true that politics at local level too often attract a peculiar type of person although here too there are very good exceptions to the rule.

I do not object to ranting about councillors.
I do not object to writing here about ligitimate causes
Nor do i object to putting up a hanger without a permit (everyone is entitled to take a risk)

But this thread gives the destinct impression of some construction having gone up without permission and a subsequent rant afterwards towards the council threatening to pull everything down.

And that rant (given the wide readership of PPRUNE) will hardly strengthen the cause of GA.

I hope the grass reinforcement will not have to be removed and the aerodrome will live happy ever after

As per my previous post, I am suprised that the grass reinforcement was held to be an issue.

One could do other things (like drainage) which can also be used to increase the # of movements. In fact drainage alone could increase movements several times. Is draining a breach of Planning?

I am willing to learn on this one, but reading what is here seems bizzare. Maybe it is not the whole story.

Given my recent experience of 'planning in action' it is probably true.

My strip was alongside a golf course. Originally farmland, the owner went through all the hurdles necessary and it was officially opened by our local councillor.

2 years later Jim put in alternative tees to save the wear on the originals. The council then took enforcement action for unpermitted development.

There were 6 tees which were about 20 foot square and about a foot high, grassed naturally and with gentle sloped up to them (so the mower was able to cut them without problems....... On a site of approximately 200 acres.

Absolute nonsense. But unfortunately true.