The other application at last Thursday’s meeting was in Eastcheap, Rayleigh – to knock down one bungalow and build three houses. The unusual part about this was that one of the proposed houses had 6 bedrooms.
The public gallery was full with about 50 very polite members of the public, and following some very lengthy and detailed speeches by Lib Dem ward members Chris and June Lumley, plus support from several councillors including Heather Glynn and Terry Cutmore, the scheme was refused on the grounds of overdevelopment and ‘out of scale’.
At the moment many of our council planning policies are based on the assumption that houses never really have more than four bedrooms. So a six-bedroom house only has to have 100 square metres of usable garden space – the same as a three or four-bedroom house. We are now pressing for this to change.