1.     Pursuant to Paragraph 10 of the Council Procedure Rules the following question was put by Mr Bernard Brown and answered by Councillor Vine-Hall.

Question: The Planning Inspector allowed the appellants appeal on the case of Outline Planning Refusal at Clavering Walk, Bexhill. (RR/2018/3127/P).  What were total the costs, direct and indirect, to the Council of the Appeal?  What was the value of the New Homes Bonus forfeited as a result of the lost Appeal?

The total costs direct and indirect were £73,387 appeal costs New Homes Bonus approx. £500,000[1] (depending on the number of units approved at reserved matters).

The Appeal by Sea Change Sussex and Westcott Leach the Buckholt Lane Application has now been held but at the time of asking this question the decision has not been announced.  What estimates and/or provisions have been made for costs to the Council for:

For the record this appeal has yet to be determined.

1.     Worst case scenario: Lost appeal and costs awarded: What is the estimate of appellants and Council’s costs to be met by the Council?

A total of £35,500 estimated costs to the Council for defending the Councils case broken down as follows:

Barrister - £3,500 (hearing only)

Landscape Officer - £7,000 (statement preparation and hearing)

Ecology Officer - £7,000 (as above)

Design Officer - £9,000 (as above)

Planning Officer - £9,000 (as above)

Whilst the appellant has submitted a costs claim (in principle) as part of the appeal (which was vigorously opposed by the Council at the hearing) the appeal has yet to be determined.  Therefore, the costs claim also remains yet to be determined and the amount will only be disclosed to the Council by the appellant if the costs claim is successful.

2.     Second level scenario: Whatever the result, the Council’s own costs having to be met by Council: What is the estimate of the costs to be met?”

As above £35,500.

Supplementary Oral Question:  My supplementary question relates specifically to the Buckholt Lane planning application. If the Council lost the appeal, the cost to the Council Tax Payer would probably be in excess of £100,000. If, however, the Council won the appeal, the Rother economy stands to lose £1.94m of Government funding. SELEP will have to re-allocate the money away from the SeaChange project, because the funding is planning permission dependant, before the end of this financial year. Whichever way you look at it, whether it’s £100,000 or £1.9m, it would appear that Rother Tax Payers lose again. This seems bizarre, as the Council actually owns 6.63% of SeaChange Sussex, is registered at Companies House as a Person of Significant Control, and even has a director on the board.

My supplementary question is, does the administration accept that together with all these items, that we’ve got over £2m which has been lost on housing applications which have gone to appeal because we got it wrong – you may not agree with it, but we got it wrong – that these are unacceptable losses that the Council, since 2019 have been totally responsible, and can Councillor Vine-Hall now tell Rother residents what steps are being taken to make sure this incompetence isn’t repeated again.

Answer:  Well that’s a very long question, I don’t think there’s been any incompetence.  With regard to the Clavering Walk application and in fact the appeal, was held before this [2]administration so really this administration has had no input into that whatsoever, so if there’s any incompetence it falls on the previous administration.

However, having said that I don’t think it was a bad decision based on planning policy and I think it was, from what I can see, quite an acceptable position to take. Unfortunately, this is what planning is about, you can’t say, we lost a certain amount of money in new homes bonus if it was a bad application for whatever reason, you can just continue to make figures up as much as you like, but if it’s a bad application it’s a bad application.

It’s the same case with SeaChange Sussex, the Council had been engaging with SeaChange for a very long period of time over their application which sadly, they refused to acknowledge the discussions, and SeaChange owned the land but had Westcott Leach do the application. If you read the planning policy and the core strategy in the Development and Site Allocations Local Plan, it requires a master plan for that site, and SeaChange were not prepared to do that masterplan and tried to sell part of the site to Westcott Leach and therefore only put in a part application, if you like.

It was a poor show, worse than that, the actual application was for units which were so far away from the policy that there was no chance that they would be accepted by either the planners or the Planning Committee. So, I’m afraid if they have caused themselves to lose funding then it’s only because they did not engage for some years before that application came to Council to bring forward an application that was policy compliant, simple as that.