Unhappy at the postponement of Park Road planning decision

STUDENT house plans withdrawn: Echo, March 15

I am writing to you as a resident of Park Road for nearly 30 years and as the organiser of the petition against the application to join two student HMOs (Houses of Multi-Occupation) a few doors away from where we live (nos 97-99).

Since the petition and the letters written by residents making an objection were made, it had already taken months for the planning application to come to CBCs Plans Committee.

I kept residents informed so that we could attend the meeting. Imagine the shock when the day before the meeting, I was told that the application had been delayed for technical reasons.

Your own article a couple of weeks ago and Labour councillor Robert Sharp’s appeal for more public participation in planning issues naturally assumed a degree of competence on the part of the borough council in keeping people informed.

What was the point of getting residents organised only to have to tell them within hours that their presence was no longer required? Now we’ve got to go through the whole procedure again.

The technical issue had to do with the classification of the property – something the officers clearly got wrong first time round.

This was not the only error. In their report to the committee, they not only underestimated the number of HMOs in the locality but assumed that 101 (bang next door to 99) was unoccupied.

This house has been occupied for almost a year by its owner! How could the officers have missed this?

The officers were proposing that the application be approved by the committee in spite of a whole range of objections by local people, local Conservative councillors and members of the Labour Party.

Increasing the number of students from nine to 12 in the combined building was seen as a trifling matter. It’s not if you have to park your car a 100 metres away in Middleton Place or the far end of Charnwood Road.

Park Road is part of what is jokingly referred to as a conservation area. This seems to mean that conservation requirements have to be adhered to, but only in planning applications.

Once they’ve been acknowledged there is no-one at CBC who cares to enforce them.

There is for example a requirement that there be adequate bin storage. That won’t stop students leaving large numbers of smelly black bins at the front.

Nor will officers prevent them from doing so (the current number of bins outside our three HMOs stands at 10 – still another couple is a trifling matter).

Once these two attractive dwellings have been made into one, there is little likelihood of them ever reverting to two separate homes, so we’ll be stuck with them forever.

And although they might be seen as ‘luxury’ accommodation now, a few years down the line they will look like all the other HMOs in the area.

The Park Road we moved into all those years ago has been marred by a slow deterioration of many properties.

Councillors and officers are supposed to be preventing more and more areas descending into the blight that has occurred in the Storer/Ashby Road area. Arthur Gould Park Road, Loughborough