Just as I was about to start writing a speech yesterday evening to deliver today at the Planning Committee meeting in Bridgnorth to decide the fate of the turbine application at Upton Cressett, I received an email from Grahame French, the council’s chief planning officer.
Dear Councillors,
I am writing to let you know that the applicant has just withdrawn the above planning application.
I apologise for the late notice. The item will still appear on the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting but it will not be necessary to debate the proposals.
So after three years of bitter fighting, costing our local community tens of thousands of pounds, with the council finally deciding (on advice from English Heritage) not to recommend granting planning permission, Crida have chickened out of even putting the application to the vote.
This ‘withdrawl’ came only hours after the Planning Committee, led by planning officer Graham French and councillor Stuart West, visited Upton Cressett as part of a site visit prior to today’s planning meeting.
Yesterday was one of those magical Shropshire days that I am sure PG Wodehouse had in mind when he described the countryside around Bridgnorth as ‘The Paradise of England’.
Serving some barley lemon squash by our medieval tent on the Moat Lawn, I was delighted to show the Councillors around the ancient hamlet of Upton Cressett on such a beautiful and hot day yesterday in Shropshire. Although the visit lasted less than 15 minutes, I hope it enabled the planning committee to have a better understanding of why Upton Cressett is one of the most heavily protected heritage sites in the West Midlands.
As chairman of our local campaign group, I know I speak for very many in the Bridgnorth and South Shropshire Hills community – and across Shropshire – in saying that we hope this means that we can now put this highly divisive application behind us and (after three years) all get back to our normal lives.
We sincerely hope the farmer Clive Millington will now see that there is no further point in pursuing this highly controversial application that has personally cost the local community tens of thousands of pounds – I’ve spent close to £20,000 alone defending my family home – untold stress and has bitterly caused a state of near civil war in the local hills around Bridgnorth.
Any attempt to modify the application will be met with the strongest legal response on the grounds of a ‘frivolous and vexacious’ campaign to cause financial and personal distress to the local community.
English Heritage have made it clear they are not about to change their mind about the damage to the historic setting, which is protected by the NPPF. So no amount of tinkering with blade heights will change the fact that the application failed various tests of national planning law on heritage and landscape grounds.
The statutory protections contained within the NPPF were specifically designed to protect important heritage sites like Upton Cressett; and we are a good test case of the effectiveness of the NPPF in safeguarding both the ‘matchless beauty’ of the English countryside and the settings of our historic houses – so essential for the £16 billion that heritage tourism contributes to the economy.
As a community, we have been fighting for three years now to save the beauty of the South Shropshire Hills around Bridgnorth. Whilst we are pleased that Crida have withdrawn their application, they only did so after being directly informed by the head planning officer in his official report that the council would not be recommending the application should be approved by the South Shropshire Planning Committee.
This is a position we have taken from the very start of this bitter and highly divisive application three years ago when it was perfectly clear to anybody with any professional knowledge of the planning system that an application to erect for two huge industrial 80m turbines only 1600 metres away from Upton Cressett, one of the jewels of Shropshire heritage, with three Grade 1 listed buildings, and three Scheduled Ancient Monuments, should be turned down on heritage and landscape planning grounds alone.
Thankfully, despite cuts, the Council has a robust heritage environmental team, lead by Dr Andy Wigley whose report recommending refusal followed the lead of English Heritage who also Objected in the strongest terms to an application that clearly breached the statutory protection given to heritage assets in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).
Pursuing the application until the eleventh hour despite opposition from consultees and bodies as the Churches Conservation Trust, the Historic Houses Association, the Bridgnorth and District and Tourism Association and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings – not to mention the communities living in South Shropshire who love the local landscape – was not only very bad judgement as well as a huge waste of community resources and Council money.
Moreover, the site chosen straddled the track on both sides of one of the most iconic pats of the Jack Mytton Way, the county’s flagship tourist trial – and would have had a devastating impact on equestrian tourism.
Tourism is essential to the shropshire economy and the Council’s own ‘plan’ makes it clear that the countryside is the county’s ‘greatest asset’ and that its tranquil character should be retained. We are grateful for the Council for their balanced approach in not recommending the application, which was also opposed by various ecological groups, including failing a bat survey, and the British Horse Society.
The last three years has brought the Shropshire Hills around Bridgnorth to the point of a bloody local war. This is a battle we will fight to the bitter end to win but planning officers need to make clear to applicants such as Crida that the voice of the local community has been heard. They cannot be permitted to keep ‘playing’ the planning system as if it is is a game purely for their own commercial benefit.
The Shropshire Hills and our local landscape is owned by the community – by all of us – and we sincerely hope as a campaign group (with over 500 members) that the recommendation of the chief planning officer Grahame French not to recommend permission will be respected.
After three years of bitter fighting we all want to get back to our lives with the right to enjoy the beauty of Shropshire without the prospect of giant industrial triffids destroying our unique built heritage and what makes the Shropshire countryside the envy of not only England but the rest of the world.