Planning Application- Unhappy About Objection Cock Up - Advise Please?

[RockinHippy]

Long story, but will try & keep it brief.

We have an ongoing issue with planning proposals to pub next door. The upper floors of which are to become office space with a new commercial doorway added right next to ur front door. (Right under DDs bedroom window) Other proposed plans were beyond outrageous & even included the pubs new owners building on top of our property & directly onto our end walls blocking established right of access.

Rear plans were eventually revised & more acceptable. The door still stands to cause potential problems, not least as it's a business entrance & the adjoining stairway runs right behind DDs bed head. Having met with the buildings new owner alongside a local heritage representative (listed building) the new owner seemed amicable enough & we could understand why he wanted to add this door, but it wasn't in our best interests & we asked for a covenant to be added to the deeds to give us some legal recourse if in future he sold on. This was agreed & was to say that staff from these offices couldn't smoke or congregate within 5m of this new entrance & that the offices couldn't be let to a taxi office, courier company or similar. (To minimise any noise disturbance & blocking of our doorway/windowsill etc)

Since this meeting though agreeing to our requests so that we could then withdraw our objections, the owner/builder has made lots of empty promises & excuses, but has not come up with the legal paperwork, preferring instead to feign misunderstanding & offer clauses written into the leases for his future business tenants. Though this is good for now, long term we do not feel it offers us any protection.

Yesterday I came home to the shock of a new door, turns out that his planning proposals were accepted yesterday & this was the first we knew about it. Seems our councillor had withdrawn her objection based on him telling her we had agreed to withdraw ours based on his proposed lease clauses. It appears hers & ours were the only objections that they accepted.

Long chat to the case officer yesterday had me with more questions than answers, especially as he clearly thought the new door was for the pub itself, yet still thought it okay to pass the application 😧 he also seemed to think we were objecting to the pub itself, which is ridiculous considering we have lived here happily for 18 years, though we have had noise problems with the pub on & off since 2005 when some idiot leaseholders ripped out sound proofing & sneakily had a live music license added. The pub itself, with a good landlord we have no problem with. Unfortunately we have had a lot of different owners since 2005 & some have been dreadful, resulting in us needing to involve environmental health over substantial noise complaints. We even had to involve the police with one aggressive & very shady owner & they put him on notice of a restraining order (not sure of the legality, but he was served a warning, which meant he would be arrested next time he came near us or our property.


This lead to him bad mouthing us to anybody who would listen, mostly that we should put up & shut up as we chose to live next to a pub. This, we hate the pub attitude, has stuck a bit & cleverly using social media, stirred up by the new owner on a local history group.

This resulted in a lot of "supporting comments" though in favour of keeping the pub, which we had never objected to in the first place

Today I have seen the update on the councils planning application website, see attached photo

We are p'd off as it says plainly for the world to see, that we objected to the pub itself reopening as it's been quiet when it's closed. The pub was not closed at all. Just had caretaker landlord for a while who was quiet, respectful of the neighbourhood & gave us no cause to complain


So it seems there isn't much we can do bar hope our new neighbour abided by his word, but I'm concerned as to what exactly they granted the application approval on, I feel that we've been painted as unreasonable complainers & im very unhappy at what is written in the notes on the website.

What can I do ?

[HiDBandSIL]

There should be a planning officer's report available on the website that will set out the reasons for the decision.

Unfortunately I don't think that you can appeal against the decision.