Volunteers who manage one of South Bristol’s most popular wildlife spaces have said they are ‘totally disgusted’ with the way the council granted planning permission to build 34 new homes on part of the site.
The Northern Slopes Initiative said they are considering taking further action against Bristol City Council, and are demanding answers from council planners over what happened.
The group claim council planners had been working on plans for 34 new homes on Kingswear Road, then changed them and awarded themselves planning permission without going before a public committee - all in one day - on a day the council’s planning website was offline because of pre-planned maintenance.
Read more: Council gives itself permission to build 34 new homes despite local objections
The Northern Slopes Initiative hit out at the council and have sent planning chiefs a list of questions about what happened. But Bristol City Council has said that a number of factors would have led to whether the application for Kingswear Road was decided by officers or a committee, including the wishes of the councillors for Knowle West, the number of objections and whether the plans needed to be decided on by councillors.
None of the local councillors had objected to the application for the new council homes, and none had ‘called it in’ to be heard by the planning committee - Bristol Live understands they had simply assumed it would be.
The Northern Slopes Initiative manages and maintains the series of nature reserves on the slopes from Bedminster up to Knowle West and Knowle, that run from ‘The Bommie’ above Wedmore Vale in the east to Novers Hill in the west - the green, heavily-wooded area is the green escarpment seen from across the city centre.
A council housing estate on one prominent site at Kingswear Road in the heart of the Northern Slopes was demolished in 2011 after a long battle with the people who lived there, after council chiefs deemed the flats and homes to be unstable on the side of the steep slope. Plans for new council homes on that site have been drawn up in the ten years since, but never came to anything until a new set of plans for 34 homes on Kingswear Road were presented in 2019. A series of consultations with local residents and the Northern Slopes Initiative continued through the pandemic to earlier this year.
There were some objections, including from the Northern Slopes Initiative, who were unhappy the plans included building on some of the green space, not just on the footprint of the old demolished flats.
But on Friday, March 11 this year, the plans were amended by the council department proposing them, and then given permission through ‘delegated powers’, without going before a council planning committee in public, which would have given the chance for residents to make representations to the councillors deciding.
It's claimed that both of those things took place when the council’s planning website was offline due to pre-planned maintenance, so the first many local residents and many in the NSI knew about the changes and the planning permission being granted was after the decision had already been made, when Bristol Live published an article about it on Monday, March 14.
“While we were extremely disappointed that the council had decided not to enable interested parties to have their cases heard at the planning committee,” said Lucy Wyatt, the chair of the Northern Slopes Initiative, “we are totally disgusted by the way that interested parties were excluded from commenting on new and amended documentation, which was placed before the delegated officer and published on the council’s planning portal on March 11 on the same day, as the decision was made according to the Planning Portal.
“But unbelievably on March 11, the planning portal itself was offline due to pre planned maintenance. So no one would have been aware that the documents had been published – or had the chance to comment. It is in our view immaterial whether or not people wanted to comment, or would – the opportunity has to be given,” she added, in a letter to the mayor, Marvin Rees.
“To conclude we believe that this situation should not have occurred in the first place, and must never be allowed to be repeated,” she added.
The issue is a sensitive one in Knowle West, with the council awarding itself planning permission for new homes on a number of sites it owns around the area. Around the corner of the Knowle West escarpment, the council has scaled back its plans for hundreds of new homes on the Western Slopes - between Knowle West and Headley Park - but will still be assessing Goram Homes’ application for new homes on brownfield sites at the top of the slopes there.
In a series of tweets in the week leading up to Friday, March 11, the day the council recorded that it had given itself planning permission for the Kingswear Road application, the council's Twitter account addressed the issue of the planning portal website pages being shut down, as people were raising it as an issue.
The council said on Twitter that day: "Planning online is unavailable across a number of dates in march to allow essential maintenance to take place. During these times, residents can still submit comments on planning applications by emailing. Consultation periods for all planning applications affected by this will be extended to account for this interruption. No new documents will be added to an application during this time, so you won't miss any new informationm," before telling local residents that a list of the exact dates the planning portal would be offline would be posted on the council's website.
A Bristol City Council spokesperson said the plans make good use of a site that had homes on it before, and will ultimately improve the green spaces around there. They added: “Noting the merits of the scheme and following public consultation in early 2021, which included engaging with local residents, councillors, and other stakeholders, officers decided to grant permission under their delegated powers."
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