BULLDOZERS SET TO DEMOLISH FENLAND HOME, AND BY THE WAY THERE'S AN ELECTION NEXT WEEK
SOMETIME next week, but probably on Monday, bulldozers are expected to arrive in a quiet Fenland road and begin the unpleasant task of uprooting a pleasant enough couple from their home.
The names of these unfortunate pair are well known to readers of the Wisbech Standard, for they are Spud and Jill Griffin who have been plunged into conflict with Fenland Council for the best part of a decade – probably longer – over a number of planning and enforcement issues.
They’ve fought, as best they can, against being required to move their mobile home from a back road in Elm but the battle is lost. Last Monday they received a final ‘7 day letter’ notifying of the council’s intent.
If they don’t go voluntarily, and I have little expectation of that given Spud’s diminishing health, and neither I, nor they, have the faintest idea of where they will go. The council has told them the costs of removing their home, and everything in it, will be charged back to them by way of a charge on their land. An Englishman’s home is truly not their castle.
Despite the intervention, at sometime, of MP Malcolm Moss, the couple’s idiosyncratic life style and refusal to accept the rigid hand of planners and enforcement officers (they once notably, and publicly, tried an unsuccessful £4 million law suit against FDC) has kept them in the public eye.
At least in the eye of those who job it is to enforce the many and varied parts of the planning laws that engulf our society.
Actually I have no real view, either way, of the merits of the Griffins’ case, not having the time or legal background to avail myself of the procedures involved which have led to their eviction, nor to examine in detail their transgressions.
However what I have seen, and what disturbs me, is the gleeful approach of those involved in enforcement, and the apparent injustice of singling out a handful for enforcement when many, many other cases go undetected or unchallenged.
Of course Fenland is proud of its tough enforcement policy, and in many ways the planning system is arcane and has allowed illegal structures to appear across the Fens. But one must surely look at individual cases and inquire as to whether such draconian measures are needed ?
Of the correspondence to the Griffins that I’ve seen there is no doubt they are a matter of a few years from owning land for which residential housing will be agreed: drive down Begdale Road, Elm, yourself and you’ll see for yourself how close they are already to the village development plan.
The Griffins, sadly, are not alone: the law has been applied to all manners of recalcitrant home owners, whether they be home owners on a large scale such as Hazelmere Homes – threatened with being forced to demolish an entire housing estate- to the man from Newton told this week to rip out a swimming pool, the man from Whittlesey told to tear down a car port, or the man from Coates told to tear down a half built bungalow (or half re-built existing home, depending which view of its antecedents you take).
We’ve seen the very public demolition of a half completed barn conversion near Wisbech, and we expect very soon the demolition of a converted stable at Bedlam Bridge near March being occupied illegally by one John Gawthorp.
Enforcement officers have never been so busy, yet few are questioning whether such tactics are either necessary or humane in a modern society.
The issue has replaced my thoughts earlier in the week as to whether I could offer any further illumination of the current election taking place for FDC next Thursday. Sadly I can’t.
All I hear is a barrage of spin suggesting everything in the garden is rosy, and that FDC has never been so well run, and ‘we have the awards to prove it.’ The electorate either like, or show disinterest, since the Tories are already assured of 22 of the 40 seats on the council without a vote being cast.
I have little argument against those who have looked at and then left the political stage, and have allowed such complacency to envelop the electoral process. People have the right not to vote just as they have the right not to take part.
I am unsettled, however, by the paucity of such debate as there is going on, with arguments this week reaching my ears of whether Council Leader Geoff Harper did or did not promise video footage of the last council meeting would be aired, or whether FDC councillors email addresses are on the website (they’re not, despite many, including councillor Jill Tuck who phoned me yesterday on an unrelated matter, and was was gob smacked to hear from me, and checked while we spoke on the phone, that e mail addresses indeed they were missing from the FDC website).
Pockets of Fenland have provided some sustenance for political anoraks such as me, notably the canvassing of the Chatteris electorate for votes by the Liberal Democrats whose performances, individually and collectively, have ensured much rancour long after the results are known. Personally I think it is also super fun. If there is to be no serious political scrutiny of policies, then an unsavoury mixture of individual name calling and knockabout jousting by the candidates involved must surely be the next best thing.
Those complaining should, as I frequently say these days, get over it. However bruising the next few days becomes, by Friday it will all be over, and we can settle down to those successful candidates being in place for an unencumbered and comfortable four years.
That the only opposition to the status quo, as it were, has come from some rabble rousing Lib Dems ought to be welcomed, if for no other reason they remind us all that an election is about putting forward alternative views, and challenging us all to make judgements about performances past and visions for the future.
PS: Thank you to the councillor who, in response to my umpteenth inquiry about a particularly annoying, but relatively minor issue, responded today with a curt email which began "GO AWAY………………………."
Ok, gone………for now!