Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio

Subject: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 14 Apr 15 - 07:02 AM

[sorry about the "2" in title, doing it makes me cringe - but needs must - not enough room for "to"]

Disabled musician told to demolish Wiltshire recording studio

Anyone know more about this ?

Is anger & resistance futile ???

Subject: RE: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 14 Apr 15 - 07:10 AM

slightly more informative report:

http://m.wiltshiretimes.co.uk/news/12868179.Holt_music_studio_has_to_be_torn_down/

Subject: RE: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: Lester
Date: 14 Apr 15 - 07:36 AM

Could also be headlined as "Bloke who built a building without planning permission has to remove it"

Subject: RE: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: Will Fly
Date: 14 Apr 15 - 08:02 AM

It's a sad story - but it does highlight the need for people - whether disabled or not - to get proper advice when dealing with local council planning regulations.

The regulations may well have been put together by a person or persons with half an arse - but you have to work within the rules. There's also the problem that, if the council says, "Aah, well, just this once then...", it creates a precedent that other, less innocent and more calculating people will exploit.

Subject: RE: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: GUEST,Ray
Date: 14 Apr 15 - 08:17 AM

Looks like the old story of pleading innocent because you don't understand the rules or you think they're too complicated.

If he was going to sink approaching £200K into something, you'd think he'd have taken advice first. With respect to the rules, they haven't really changed that much since they were introduced in 1947 - a mere 60+ years ago.

He would have had the chance to plead his case to the local planning authority at the time he submitted his retrospective planning application, before a goverment inspector when he appealed and before a judge in the high court. As usual, everyone but the developer is wrong!

Time for the bulldozer me thinks.

Subject: RE: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: FreddyHeadey
Date: 14 Apr 15 - 08:32 AM

He was mistaken in doing this but
there was a barn there previously and I would have thought the local council would get themselves better press if they found some way of allowing retrospective permission.
I googled various things and didn't find any local complaints about it.
There is more info and a petition here http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/to-keep-the-new-barn-from-being-demolished/s (maybe too late anyway)

Not much in the way of neighbours google map  but I wonder what they think.

Subject: RE: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 14 Apr 15 - 09:13 AM

I am all in favour of giving equal opportunities to the disabled.

Had an able bodied person built this recording studio, (or had it built) without planning permission, they would be told to demolish it.

So this is equal treatment.

Subject: RE: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: GUEST,M
Date: 14 Apr 15 - 10:19 AM

I'm not sure what the point of the word "Disabled" in the subject line or the news item is.

My reading of the Wiltshire Times article - especially his weasel words about being "'largely unaware' of the fact that planning permission was required" - suggests that he should have known (and probably did know) that he was pushing his luck. Having exhausted the official channels available he's now trying a bit of manipulative PR in a last-ditch attempt to escape the consequences of his action.

Anger and resistance is not just futile, it's inappropriate. The guy broke planning regulations and had the attempt to get retrospective permission rejected after due process had been followed, all the way to the High Court. He was in the wrong and his disability is totally irrelevant.

Subject: RE: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: GUEST,M
Date: 14 Apr 15 - 10:27 AM

A little bit more information has emerged from the BBC news website.

"Nick Allen had planning permission to rebuild a storage barn in Holt near Bradford on Avon, but it did not include conversion into a studio."

I can't find a diplomatic way to express my interpretation of this.

Subject: RE: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: GUEST,Ray
Date: 14 Apr 15 - 10:51 AM

Presumably the "disability" angle is intended to make the action of the authorities seem harsh and sell more newspapers. As to the legal difference between a storage barn and a recording studio, the former is an agricultural building and the latter is an industrial building. Holt appears to be a small town/village in the countryside where an agricultural building would be appropriate whereas an industrial building may well not; depending upon its size and location. I am sure that this will have been considered by the relevant authorities who have published policies on such matters which will have been subject to extensive publicity and an examination in public (a public inquiry in other words). Decisions on planning matters are not simply taken on the fly.

Subject: RE: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: GUEST,#
Date: 14 Apr 15 - 11:56 AM

' "Nick Allen had planning permission to rebuild a storage barn in Holt near Bradford on Avon, but it did not include conversion into a studio." '

So he's storing a studio in the barn. Course, that might not fly . . .

Subject: RE: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: Rumncoke
Date: 14 Apr 15 - 01:07 PM

The area is very rural, little country roads winding between the hedges and villages, and the term 'barn' is well understood in those parts.

With the area being green belt as well anyone deciding to invest a wad of money into building a recording studio there without the necessary planning permissions in place has to be a chancer or brain damaged.

There are loads of programs on TV about the trials and tribulations of people wishing to build on rural sites and having to wait for the meeting to get the go ahead, or going ahead and then going through all sorts of anguish, with a real danger of being told to demolish due to their disregard of the rules.
Admittedly, the ones in the programs are the ones which succeed - otherwise the rest of the program could never have been made, but surely no one could claim they were ignorant of the pitfalls - not with a straight face.

Subject: RE: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: Rob Naylor
Date: 14 Apr 15 - 09:56 PM

Well if he had "planning permission to rebuild a storage barn" then presumably he *applied* for this permission and would have been issued with documents when it was granted that outlined what category of permission he'd been granted and the types of use this covered.

Sounds like a chancer to me, who's now playing the disability card to try and win over a public sympathy groundswell to make the council change its mind.

Subject: RE: Disabled musician told 2 demolish studio
From: GUEST,Howard Jones
Date: 15 Apr 15 - 05:42 AM

It's hardly a secret that you need planning permission. As Ray points out, this is nothing new, there is plenty of information on-line and the local planning authority could have told him, for free, what was needed.

Its possible this guy was just incredibly naive. However it is far from unusual for people to carry on without permission in the hope that the planning authority won't want a fight. The issues are not just the visual appearance but the impact on other amenities, as well as not setting a precedent. If the Council had been minded to grant consent they could have done so retrospectively, so they presumably have good reasons for going for enforcement instead.

The article itself isn't playing the disability angle, although the photo may win him some sympathy. Any new development would have to comply with the Disability Act and be disability-friendly, so that description is unnecessary.