Last week a judge fined a Doncaster man £250,000 for a “flagrant” breach of planning law after he set up a makeshift business park on his farm without planning permission. 57-year-old Nigel Smith’s business park consisted of portable offices and caravans parked on greenfield land which he had covered with hardcore.
According to barristers Francis Taylor Building, which acted for Doncaster Council, Smith was first issued with an enforcement notice in 2011 and subsequently issued with a fine for £2,000 following a breach of the notice. Despite being served with four more enforcement notices, Smith failed to comply. Sentencing him last week, Mr Recorder Hubbard QC said that it was “difficult to imagine such a flagrant breach in defiance of the enforcement notices” and issued a fine of £250,000. Smith, of Manor Farm on Moss Road, Moss, faces a two-year prison sentence if he does not pay up within 30 days and has also been ordered to pay the council’s costs of £13,575.
So how did Doncaster Council secure the conviction?
“It’s taken a lot of man hours,” says Doncaster Council’s investigation team manager, who has asked not to be named. He says that “continuous monitoring” was necessary to show the court a “flagrant disregard” of planning law and an intensification of use. “We’re down there with the police, entering the site with a warrant to take a photographic record every couple of months.”
The council’s investigation team manager says that Google Earth was used to demonstrate the transition from greenfield to developed site. He says that Google Earth was used to show that, in 2002, there was a farm on the site and that the field adjacent to the farm was just green grass. This was then compared to the current situation, he says, where the farm has been demolished and the field next door transformed into a hardcore compound “which one of the local residents has likened to a concentration camp”.
According to the investigation team manager, fines are often not sufficient to dissuade people from flouting planning rules. It’s the threat of imprisonment that can “rattle” offenders, he says. Doncaster Council always pushes for cases to be heard in the higher court because the penalties “tend to be proportionately more effective”, he says. “Our experience is that magistrates are not seeing many planning cases and therefore are not really au fait with them,” he says. “In the higher courts you have someone who is probably more experienced and who can level appropriate penalties for flagrant breaches.