Batleys – the banging and crashing cash-and-carry – has lost its latest appeal against restricted opening hours on Sundays (Ref. PPA-230-2135).
As last reported here in the autumn (Breaking news, 29.10.14), Batleys on McDonald Place were refused retrospective planning consent to extend their Sabbath opening hours so they could operate between 8.30am and noon. Instead their hours were restricted to 7am–8pm, Monday to Saturday only, with no deliveries outside those hours.
The aim of the restriction was to ‘limit the effect of noise and disturbance on nearby residents’: i.e. give them a break from the banging and crashing and occasionally menacing throb of engines. Batleys wasn't happy and had another shot.
Yesterday, the Reporter appointed by Scottish Ministers dismissed Batleys' latest appeal on the grounds that CEC’s condition (limited hours) was: relevant to development and planning, and was enforceable and precise.
The movement of trolleys across the hard car park surface resonates loudly after they are collected from the outdoor trolley bays and moved into the premises, and again when the customers emerge from the premises with their laden trolleys and move to their own vehicles to load their purchased goods, then finally returning the emptied trolley to the trolley bay. Customers’ vehicles include vans as well as cars, and additional noise is caused by the opening and closing of doors, which include metal shutter doors in some of the vans, as well as by the transfer of goods into the vehicles.
Boundary walls, said the Reporter, offer little in the way of a noise buffer to locals in rooms above ground-floor level, and nearby residents – of whom there is an increasing number in this area – had offered clear descriptions of the causes and effects of disturbance. This was another clincher in deciding that the Council’s conditions on trading hours were both necessary and reasonable.
I recognise that restricting the trading operations from the cash and carry business premises is likely to have an adverse impact on its business, and may also cause some inconvenience to some of its customers. However its operations do adversely affect many of its neighbours, and their expectations of relative absence of intrusive noise and disturbance from adjacent premises on Sunday mornings are not unreasonable. I find therefore that permitting the business to operate on Sunday mornings would represent an intensification of a non-residential use in a predominantly residential area which would be contrary to Policy Hou 8 of the local plan, as it would have a materially detrimental effect on the living conditions of nearby residents.
Spurtle has recently had good reason to look sceptically at how the Planning system works in Edinburgh. On this occasion, though, the combination of residents, local politicians, the Planning Development Subcommittee and the Appeals structure have combined to reach what strikes us as a fair but firm compromise.
Residents certainly concede the most in what is primarily a residential area, but at least they now have one morning a week in which to count their blessings.
Let’s hope that’s the end of it.