Brief report on Corbridge Parish Council's consideration of an application by Egger for the Construction of warehouse and fuel storage building, refurbishment of existing production line buildings, including in filling between the two buildings, refurbishment of amenity building and relocation of silo. (20080695)
Derick Tiffin
When they considered the planning applications, Bill Grigg (Clerk of Sandhoe PC and Chair of Corbridge PC), read out the description of the Egger proposal. The immediate responses from the 6 councillors present were along the lines of…
“Oh no, Egger is a big enough eyesore in Tynedale already, we can’t let them do that.”
“A blot on the landscape already, why make it worse?”
“Extending further along the valley would be disastrous”
“All that nonsense about 45 jobs – they won’t be for local people, we all know that everyone who works there travels from Prudhoe or Newcastle
“Anything we say won’t be taken into account – nobody listens to us”
“We need to make sure that there is proper screening – what they have provided so far is inadequate”
“We’re just a voice in the wilderness”
One councillor said that she couldn’t comment because her husband had worked for Egger for [number] years. Interestingly though, I don’t think she had declared an interest and perhaps should have done.
Bill let them comment and then stopped them to tell them that actually it wasn’t the proposal that had been featured in the Courant, but was… and went on to describe it. The councillors didn’t appear to hear what he’d said and not one of them looked at the application or the drawings which sat undisturbed in a pile on the table in front of them.
Bill adjourned the meeting and invited me to speak. I explained that the current application is for re-development within the boundaries of the existing site and is contained within an envelope of existing buildings with no significantly contentious issues other than that of development “creep”. I suggested that they needed to examine the proposals before commenting and that they might like to reserve their energies for responding to the proposal for extending the site to the east in September or October.
None of them looked at the plans and simply agreed that they should return it to TDC with “no comments”.
