Daventry District Council is prepared to risk lives

The Planning Department at Daventry District Council is failing to enforce conditions imposed on planning consents some of which were designed to ensure road safety. Site owners are being encouraged to make retrospective applications rather than being made to stick to the original conditions.

For some years, Stowe Nine Churches Parish Council has been monitoring Planning Consents in the parish to ensure conditions are met. The latest breach is on the A5 at Stowe Hill, where permission was granted in 2015 for one residential and one traveller pitch, despite objections from the neighbouring parishes.

Following previous fatal accidents on that stretch of the A5, Highways England objected to the application and a condition was imposed requiring that a safe access should be completed before anyone moved on to the site. After five years, the work hasn’t been done and occupation of the site is causing traffic issues, on an unrestricted section of the A5, making further accidents more likely.

The parish council has been advised that enforcing planning conditions is discretional and that little harm is being done, but the enforcement team has received numerous letters of complaint over the past few weeks. Local residents from the surrounding villages are angry at the way the occupation of the site has been allowed, without a lawful access and with no apparent enforcement action from the Planning Enforcement team at Daventry. A new application has been submitted to ‘regularise the breech’ and to allow a further 12 months.

It makes a nonsense of the planning system to set conditions, which the applicant can ignore, only to submit a new application to make breaches acceptable.