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14
Apr
Planning committee chair ‘sympathetic’ to calls to postpone Harrogate Spring Water meeting
The chair of the committee that will decide whether to approve Harrogate Spring Water’s plans to fell 500 trees and expand into the Pinewoods has said he has asked the council to look into moving the date of the meeting.
North Yorkshire Council announced on April 9 that its Harrogate and Knaresborough planning committee will meet on Friday (April 17) to decide on the plans.
A planning officer has recommended the expansion be approved.
The decision to give just six working days’ notice of a meeting to decide a planning application that dates back a decade and which has attracted more than 1,000 public responses, with 98.78% opposing it, has angered campaigners.
Pinewoods Conservation Group, the charity that manages the woodland in which the trees would be felled, said it had “the hallmarks of a decision being pushed through quickly to avoid proper scrutiny”.
The campaign group Save Rotary Wood suggested the short notice was a deliberate tactic to prevent it rallying support ahead of the meeting and Councillor Mike Schofield, a Green Party member whose Harlow and St George’s division on the council includes the site, described it as “not democracy”.
We asked Cllr Chris Aldred, the Liberal Democrat chair of the six-person planning committee, if he felt the concerns were legitimate and whether he had requested Friday’s meeting be put back.
Cllr Aldred said:
It is fair to say I have some sympathy with the views expressed by Pinewoods Conservation Group – and others – around the scheduling of this important planning committee meeting.
I have asked officers to look into the legalities of cancelling the meeting on Friday and moving the item for a decision at the scheduled planning committee meeting on the April 28 as a single agenda item meeting. The committee vice-chair, Cllr Haslam, is also in agreement with this approach.
The issue is now with the council’s chief legal officer and we expect a decision later today. The legal issue is if we can cancel a meeting once an agenda has been issued and publicly called. There are also practical considerations around other applications being provisionally scheduled for the 28th and the knock-on effects – legal and procedural — it would have in putting them back to later meetings.
Harrogate Spring Water, which is part of French multinational Danone, wants to fell the trees at the back of its headquarters on Harlow Moor Road to expand its bottling factory.
The company says the project would create 50 jobs and pump £17 million a year into the northern economy.
It has also pledged to plant 3,000 trees to compensate for the loss of 500 trees in the section of the Pinewoods known as Rotary Wood.
Council planning officer John Worthington has recommended the Liberal Democrat-controlled committee approve the scheme.
The councillors now have to decide whether to accept Mr Worthington’s recommendation, reject it or defer making a decision, as they did in October.
Four of the six councillors are Lib Dems, and Harrogate and Knaresborough MP Tom Gordon has spoken out against the scheme.
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