Peterborough council refuses application for car storage depot at East of England Showground

Plans to operate a car storage and maintenance depot at the East of England Showground have been refused by Peterborough City Council’s (PCC) planning committee.

The retrospective planning application for the DHL depot was voted down by seven votes to three on the grounds of amenity loss for residents.

The depot has been operated since around February this year, council planning documents say, with residents complaining that HGV lorries are causing noise and disturbance to people living around the Showground.

More than 150 public objections to the application were received by the council, although Ashley Butterfield – head of the AEGP group involved the ground’s redevelopment – says he believes many of these are duplicates, with around 30 coming from a single household and others coming in batches of five to 20.

The crux of these, though, is that the lorries going into the Showground to access the depot are creating conditions which are unpleasant and unsafe, with road signs having already been knocked down by passing vehicles.

Some objectors have also suggested that the lorries should access the ground via Joseph Odam Way rather than Dunblane Drive – as has been proposed by the applicant, East of England Showground Services Ltd – to avoid coming into contact with residential areas.

PCC’s planning officers initially recommended that the application be refused on highways grounds, but later changed their recommendation to approval – with conditions such as improvements to a junction on Dunblane Drive – after extra information was submitted.

Mr Butterfield, as well as DHL representative Mike Bristow and planning agent Nick Harding, urged PCC’s planning committee to side with officers and approve the application, saying that they were assured by the council that applying for permission retrospectively would be acceptable as there was a genuine need to move quickly on setting up the depot after it was determined that it would need to be relocated from another site.

They also suggested that lorries and other vehicles accessing it were not driving through a residential area: only part of Dunblane Drive is occupied by houses, although some lorries have taken wrong turns and ended up closer to these.

‘David and Goliath situation’

Debating the application, Cllr Christian Hogg (Liberal Democrats, Fletton and Stanground) likened the differences of opinion between residents and the applicants to a “David and Goliath” situation and said that the conditions planning officers have introduced to use of the current access point suggests it mustn’t be safe.

Cllr Julie Stevenson (Orton Waterville, Independent), speaking in her capacity as a ward councillor, also said that “trust has broken down” between Showground developers and local residents who don’t feel they’ve been sufficiently engaged with on the changes as she urged the committee to refuse the application.

Other councillors, including Cllr Lindsay Sharp (Conservatives, Hampton Vale) questioned whether there is a strong enough reason in planning policy to refuse the application which would hold up at appeal.

The application was only for temporary use by DHL – five years, although officers recommended approval for three – but permission was ultimately refused after several hours of debate.