Sheik Z Hamidi’s
Grounds for appeal may be seen in full here. (If you are on dial-up, this is at least a 2min download).
Chairman Laurence Kubiak Secretary: Jane Davies
www.saveourgreen.com
Mr
Hamidi has made an appeal against the Council’s Decision to refuse him planning
permission.
Mr. Hamidi, who bought the Green at the
junction of
The appeal will be decided by the Planning
Inspectorate on the basis of a site visit by an inspector, and written
submissions from any interested parties, including local residents. Epping
Forest District Council will submit a report defending its decision together
with all the paperwork they have on the Green so far: Mr. McLaren’s
planning applications, the Council’s refusals and all the letters from local
people opposing any development on the site.
The Residents’ Committee will prepare a detailed Statement of
Objections, as we did for Mr. McLaren’s proposal for
flats.
The decision of the Planning Inspectorate
is final. It cannot be appealed, not even to the House of Lords. If the Planning
Inspectorate decides to uphold the decision to refuse Mr. Hamidi planning
permission, he can do nothing at all with the Green under planning law, and
must abandon all hope of ever building a house on our Green. We therefore need to do everything we can
to help the Inspectorate to decide to uphold the Council’s decision.
However, if the Planning Inspectorate
decides to reverse the Council’s decision, we still have the Village Green
applications (which do not depend on any planning decisions) to fall back on. In
short, Mr. Hamidi has given us the opportunity of finally killing off any
development under the planning regulations.
Please
write to the Planning Inspectorate
Could we therefore urge you to write to the
Planning Inspectorate at the address at the end of this flyer? The Inspectorate
has to take account of your letters when reaching its decision, and the more
letters it has, the more likely it is that the decision will go against Mr.
Hamidi.
Unlike the Council, the Planning
Inspectorate does not have to make its decisions in accordance with local planning
policies or other guidance: indeed it can set planning policies aside if it
feels there is a case to do so. This means that you do not have to base your
letter around any specific planning policies as you did for the council. You
can write what you like (within reason and the law) and the inspector will take
account of it. So please feel free to tell the inspector about the Green, it’s
history, how you have used it over the years, how you felt about Mr. McLaren’s activities, how you feel about Mr. Hamidi’s activities: anything at all that is relevant to
the Green and your experience of it.
Above all, we urge you to tell the Inspector why you want to see the
Green returned to its pre-McLaren state and why no
houses must ever be built on it.
Last Friday the Committee obtained a copy
of Mr. Hamidi’s Grounds of Appeal. The most important
points are reproduced below (direct quotes are printed in italic type). If you
do chose to write to the Planning Inspectorate, we suggest that you may want to
respond to some of the points made by Mr. Hamidi, and we have added some
comments which you may find helpful. The Grounds of Appeal is a public
document, and you need have no hesitation in referring to it in your own
letter. The Committee will post the document on the website (www.saveourgreen.com)
in the next few days.
Mr.
Hamidi’s Grounds of Appeal
“Our
appeal is based on the following points:
1.
We think the decision to refuse our application is based on the premise that at
county council level the hearing regarding the “Village Green” will be
favourable to the local residents. Epping council are therefore anticipating
the outcome of a later decision by a higher authority. In Law a court cannot
make a judgement based on the based on the presumed decision of another Court
at a later time.
2.
The local resident’s claim to the land is dubious in any event because on
previous attempts to develop the land, on two consecutive nights, the hoarding
was mysteriously flattened, suggesting violent means to prevent Owner from
dealing with the land in his own way, We have had various people carrying out
surveys on the land, who have all claimed of being intimidated by local
residents, (1 in particular) as soon as they set foot on the land.
3.
Reason 1 of the refusal says that the development is too overwhelming and will
have an adverse visual impact. We have not been given an opportunity to scale down
the development, and indeed were told not to bother with any subsequent re
submission as this would end up with the same result, If the Council did not
see the resubmission how could they reject them out of hand?
4.
After having pointed out to the Council about the way
the majority of the local residents were intimidated into objecting to the
proposal, too much weight was attached to these objections. Mr. Kubiak, who is
the chairman of the local resident action group was, in our opinion openly
pressuring people into objecting, and on visiting their website this can
clearly be seen. Ihhtp://www.saveoutGreen.com/News.htmndeed.
(Ed: This appears to be a reference to http://www.saveourgreen.com/News.htm).
5.
The council should have made a decision based on the merits which would have
left enough open space for local residents to use. In fact the design and
access statement says that our client would have, by way of a section 102 agreement, to leave the land not used in the development to
local residents, and would at his own cost keep it in prime condition.”
The Residents’ Committee comments:
1. Mr. Hamidi appears not to have noticed
that neither Epping Forest County Council nor Essex County Council is a court.
There’s a clue in the titles: they’re councils, not courts, and his point is
therefore completely irrelevant.
What’s more, just imagine if Epping Forest
District Council allowed Mr. Hamidi to build a house, and Essex County Council
had then registered the land as a Green. Mr. Hamidi would then have had to pull
his house down and return the land to the state it was in before he built; and
he would no doubt sue Epping Forest District Council for damages. It follows the
only possible decision for Epping Forest District Council was to refuse Mr.
Hamidi planning permission: no responsible Council could ever have done
otherwise.
There are two parts to 2. In the first Mr.
Hamidi is saying that the land cannot be a Green because the hoarding blew
down. Not only is this illogical, it is also wrong in fact: a Green becomes a green because local people
have used it as a green for 20 consecutive years, not for any other reason, and any talk of hoardings being flattened “by
violent means” is therefore completely irrelevant. Mr. Hamidi also omits to
mention that hoardings were illegal (Mr. McLaren had
not applied for planning permission for them, and was refused planning
permission when he did apply), and that the judge in the High Court did not
agree that they had been flattened by violent means.
The second part of 2. is more serious. Given recent history,
non-locals acting suspiciously on the Green are always going to attract
mistrust and challenge, but we are not aware of any case where local people
have not behaved with perfect courtesy and stayed well within the bounds of the
law, often despite enormous provocation. Unfortunately we can’t say the same
thing about the developers we have had to deal with in recent years. If Mr.
Hamidi really has any evidence of people being intimidated he should place it
before the police.
4. We take the strongest exception to Mr. Hamidi’s suggestion that we on the Committee have resorted
to intimidation. We believe that we have
never intimidated anyone, have never intended to intimidate anyone, that the
level of support for our attempts to protect the Green is so high that we will
never need to even consider intimidating anyone, and that we do not have the
means to intimidate anyone even if we wanted to, which we don’t, and never
would. Anybody who has taken the
time and effort to write a letter of objection to the council has surely done
so voluntarily, of their own free will.
The Committee members were all elected by
proposing, seconding and a show of hands at a public meeting. Not one of us put
ourselves forward for serving on the Committee, and we have always tried to the
job local people asked us to do as effectively as we can.
If we have ever been guilty of intimidating
anyone we take this opportunity to state that this was never our intention and
we apologise without reservation. But we repeat: we do not believe we have ever
intimidated anyone, and we would like to know what evidence Mr. Hamidi has for
this outrageous slur on the honour of the members of the Committee.
Mr. Hamidi singles out Mr. Kubiak for
special condemnation, stating that he is pressurising people into objecting. Mr.
Kubiak does not see how he can pressurise anybody into looking at a website, let
alone acting upon anything they might see on that website. The website pages
Mr. Hamidi seems to be referring to simply cite local planning policies which
the Committee believes provide the Council with sufficient grounds for refusing
a planning application. This is public information, which Mr. Kubiak undertook
to research and make available to local people so that their objections to
planning applications could be more effective. How on earth can Mr. Kubiak
force anyone to access the website, look at certain pages and write a letter
based on these pages, and pressurise the Council into making a decision based
on those pages?
5. is easy. The Council did make a decision based on the merits
of the proposal. They rejected it.
As for the space that Mr. Hamidi was
prepared to leave and keep “in prime condition” for local residents; this was
by his own admission the land he could not use in his development. In fact it
was the land made unusable by the presence of the electrical substation, the
underground stream and the roots of the remaining ancient oak tree. Mr. Hamidi
might say that this is enough “open space” for locals to use. We disagree. It
is the whole of the land that has been used as a Village Green since the 1930s,
not just a small sliver that Mr. Hamidi can’t build on anyway.
Mr.
Hamidi’s letter to the Chairman of Epping Council
Mr. Hamidi has included a letter he wrote
to the Chairman of Epping Forest District Council (Mrs.Caroline
Pond) on 17th July 2007 in his Grounds of Appeal. We reproduce the text of this letter in full below. Again we note that this is a public document:
you may refer to it in your letter to the Planning Inspectorate if you so wish.
“Dear
Madam,
I
am writing to you because I am alarmed at the action being taken by the
residents of
As
you may be aware, I have recently purchased the land at the junction of Hornbeam
road and
As
I am aware of the concerns of the local residents about the scale of any
development on the site, I have had a look at the “action group’s” website, and
discover that they are actively encouraging people to make a protest against my
application. In my opinion this amounts to blackmail.
It
encourages people, who might otherwise have had NO objections whatsoever, to
launch a protest against my proposal, out of fear of being branded a bad
neighbour. The website even tells the neighbours HOE [sic] and exactly what to write in their
letters.
I
am enclosing a copy of the call to protest against me for your information in
order to show that I am not just imagining this.
This
sort of behaviour must be ignores, if not actively discouraged, as I am
starting to believe that, because of my Asian origin, they do not want me in
their neighbourhood.
As
I have said in my previous letter, it seems to me that the local residents want
the benefit of the land without paying for it.
They
were quite happy for me to pay the money and now want to claim the land as
their own. If they were concerned about the future of this land, and had such
an affinity to it as their local Village Green then why do all these residents,
who now complain about it being used for a house, not pool their money together
and bought it when it was first sold for a mere £5,000.
I
am asking you to assess the application I have proposed purely on its merits
and not be influenced by bullying from 1 or 2 local residents.
Yours
sincerely,
S.
Hamidi
Chairman
Newham Bengali Welfare Association & Education Trust.”
The Residents’ Committee comments
By encouraging local people to protest
against planning applications on the Green and telling them how they can do
this most effectively, the Committee is simply doing exactly what the local
residents asked them do. It is hard to see how anybody could ever construe this
as “blackmail”. Furthermore, Mr. Hamidi is here making a very serious
allegation, for blackmail is a criminal offence in English Law under the Section
21 of the Theft Act 1968.
The Council does not publish the name or
address of anyone who writes a letter of objection to any proposal unless the
writer gives the permission, so there is no possibility that anyone would fear
being branded as a bad neighbour in the way described by Mr. Hamidi.
Furthermore, the Committee cannot make anyone write a letter of objection
against their will. Nor is the Committee – which has 15 members, not “1 or 2” -
in any position to “bully” the Council into doing anything.
The Charles French Trust did not sell the
land on the open market, and did not advise local people that the land was for
sale. We were therefore not able to pool our resources and buy the land. When Mr.
McLaren brought a case in the High Court against the
Chairman of the Residents’ Committee, local people did not hesitate to pool their
resources, and we won the case. When Mr. McLaren sold
the land both the Parish Council and a local consortium were prepared to bid
for it, but Mr. Hamidi’s purchase of the land before
it came to auction deprived them of the opportunity.
It is also important to remember that Mr.
Hamidi himself bought the land for a “mere” £32,000 and told at least one local
person that he got it so cheaply because of the Village Green application. When
his planning application was refused last year, he put the land on the market
at £450,000, but found no buyers, and is now asking £250,000 for it.
It is difficult to know what to say about
Mr. Hamidi’s attempt to accuse an entire community of
racism. The Committee was formed fight any proposal put forward by any person
for the redevelopment of the Green. They would fight (and have fought) the
proposal in the same way no matter who the owner was.
We do hope that you will write to the
Planning Inspectorate, and that, if you do, the details in this letter are
useful. If you have written already, there is nothing stopping you from writing
again, now you have seen the Grounds of Appeal. But please do write, and
encourage your friends and neighbours to write as well. This Appeal matters
more than all the previous planning applications put together.
The address is:
The Planning
Inspectorate
Room 3/16
Eagle Wing
2 The Square
BS1 6PN
quoting reference APP/J1535/A/2065399/WF. The deadline is 3rd
April 2008. Please note that you must send 3 copies of your letter to the Planning
Inspectorate. They can all go in the same envelope.
You can also comment online at the appeals
area of the Planning Portal (www.planningportal.gov.uk/pcs).
The Village Green applications.
We do not yet have a decision on the Village
Green application –Essex County Council are being very
slow at the moment. Mr. Hamidi did lodge an objection to the second Village Green
application, but his objection is legally invalid because he did not provide
the Council with any evidence to show that the land is not a Village Green. Last
month the Council suggested of calling a public hearing before an inspector to
make a decision on our application. We are resisting this because this would
delay the decision by about a year (to spring 2009) and we believe that the
Council has more than enough evidence to grant our application now. As soon as
we know how the Council intends to reach its decision we’ll let you know.
New to the area?
Welcome to
Many thanks for
your continued support.
Sheik Z Hamidi’s
Grounds for appeal may be seen in full here. (If you are on dial-up, this is at least a 2min download).