Villagers in Cornwall are upset about a big barn conversion that’s much larger than nearby houses, calling it a planning “apocalypse” for breaking rules.
Cornwall Council is now stepping in after locals kept complaining. Now a group of residents from Paul, near Penzance, have been pushing the council to act because the new building is too big and doesn’t fit with the village’s look.
They said: “The huge new building, allowed within ‘permitted development under Class Q’, is completely out of keeping with all others in the picturesque village in terms of both style and size.”
They also mentioned that work at the site is ignoring government rules and no trees have been planted to hide the building, even though they were supposed to.
The residents added: “Overall, the unsightly development makes a mockery of central and local government encouragement of neighbourhood planning, under which residents are supposed to have meaningful input into development in their local areas.
“The ongoing failure to fulfil the tree planting condition also flies very directly in the face of Cornwall Council’s flagship ‘Forest for Cornwall’ initiative.”
The planning row has a long history. Around 2003, when Penwith District Council was the local planning authority, not Cornwall Council, a local farming family built a large barn in fields near Paul. In 2004, they applied to make the barn much bigger. At first, permission was denied, but it was later granted on appeal to the government Planning Inspectorate.
The condition was that the barn, because of its huge size, should be hidden from the north by trees. A plan to plant a small copse of mixed broadleaved trees was accepted by Cornwall Council in late October 2010.
The bigger barn was built, but no trees were planted at the site, and none have been planted since.
A spokesperson for the residents said: “Clearly, this condition was not enforced by Cornwall Council, which was the relevant local planning authority by then.”
In December 2021, an application was made to Cornwall Council to turn the barn into homes under “permitted development under Class Q”. This law, introduced in 2014 mainly to increase rural housing, lets owners change unused agricultural buildings into homes without following normal planning rules.
The large barn’s transformation into homes is nearly finished by a new developer, believed to have bought the site from a farming family.
The spokesperson said: “All of this work clearly departs very radically both in location and scale from the 2021 application and also appears to be in direct breach of the Class Q regulations,”
They continued: “In addition, various very substantial suburban-style walls are being built, including close to the entrance to the site, adding incongruity to a building design that already jars badly with the local built vernacular. And still, after more than 14 years, no trees have been planted at the site, the area where the small copse should be having now been developed in other ways altogether.”
The spokesperson added: “Overall, local residents are not only incensed by the development and what’s going on at the site, but also extremely concerned by the lack of Cornwall Council oversight and intervention.”
A spokesperson for Cornwall Council planning department told Cornwall Live: “The council can confirm that it is currently investigating alleged breaches of planning control at this particular site and that after inspecting the land and having met with the landowners it has concluded that a breach of planning control has occurred.
“It is the council’s understanding that a retrospective planning application will be submitted in due course seeking to address the works which have been undertaken.”
