Field owner is dismayed over shed reversal
Saturday 29th January 2011, 2:29PM GMT.
THE Environment Department needs to move with the times, according to one landowner who is being forced to take down his shed.
Roger Mancini (pictured) bought a field in Rue Carey, St Peter’s, in 2008. At the time, he explained his plans to Environment – and checked whether he would be allowed to erect a shed.
‘They said as long as it could not be seen from the road, it was OK,’ he said.
Having got the go-ahead from the Environment Department for the shed, it was erected last year.
But at the end of last year Mr Mancini received a letter from the department saying it had to go – along with a picnic bench and 25-litre water containers.
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Did you get it in writing? You know what they say…………….
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The picture shows what the problem is…. not enough glass
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The thing is: can it be seen from the road?
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Well done Environment in sticking to your guns.
The shed in the picture looks far too big to be merely a store for gardening tools
If this is allowed to go unchecked, then every field in ‘rural’ Guernsey will soon have a large shed, complete with picnic table, jacuzzi, patio, chemical toilet, generator, outside lighting and a parking space for the 4 wheel drive needed to get through a muddy gateway!!!
A field should be a field, not a domestic garden
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The Environment Department strikes again letting everyone know who’s the big boss in the island and to save us from small sheds, replacement fences, walls, small local retailers and small evil signs. Unfortunately Mr Mancini you did not build a large industrial building, a glass office or a wacky house not in keeping with its surroundings along with not having friends in the right places you were doomed to fail and become yet another victim of the Environment department.
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Is this the worst Environment Department EVER?
Unfortunately it is tainting the rest of the States Assembly
Time for Deputies Sirett,Tasker,Honeybill,Le Sauvage and Paint to call the mandarins in for a chat or risk losing an awful lot of votes in 2012,especially if they can’t rely so heavily on friends and relatives due to island wide voting
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This issue deserves a proper debate with the arguments for both sides being considered because it is not something that is going to go away, and both sides have a good point. It needs to be resolved.
Agricultural land must be protected…. the farming community is becoming increasingly squeezed as more and more land is being syphoned off for ‘recreation’ purposes. Farmers are being priced out of the market for land…. their situation is becoming border-line. We will all suffer if our local farming collapses.
However, equally, it is becoming increasingly important that more food is grown locally and the more people we can get involved in wanting to do that, the better. There are skills to be learnt and Guernsey needs to improve its resilience to possible disruption of its imported food supply lines.
Maybe a way round this would be to allocate a certain amount of fields to becoming community growing schemes, so that fields like Rogers are properly utilised. Concentrating all the people who want to get into growing into a reduced number of fields could maybe help to reduce the situation where increasing numbers of people are purchasing fields, growing on a section of it and leaving the rest to be unproductive. Roger would be happy to share his field with other enthusiastic growers but is unable to do that if a shed is not allowed on site.
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I see no reason to compromise. If anything Guernsey should be far tougher on people who lock up acres of productive land for their ponies and private estate expansion. The Jersey model of agri land protection is very good.
It continues to amaze me that people are on the front of the GP whining that they have been done-down in some way by the ‘Nazi Environment Department Party’ and as soon as you scratch the surface of the story you find, Environment did try and compromise with the lady with the fence, or someone didn’t get their ‘permission’ in writing, or the bloke in St Peters actually put up a pink and blue granite wall which, even lay Neil can suss, is totally out of character with the surrounding area.
Simple advice is go to Environment and get a pre-app.
As for the whole story Mr Mancini says he hasn’t got a car, so that’s why he needs a shed?
Eh? Man from town, buys field in St Peters and blames Env. because he can’t move his garden up there!
Come on eh?
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Neil,
He needs a shed because he can’t lug his gardening kit up to St Peters on the bus each day. He bought the field, neither for a pony or for ‘private estate expansion’ but because he wants to produce / grow food. Prior to his buying the field, it had not been farmed for several years. He also did talk with environment who indicated that what he wanted to do was ok…… but unbeknown to him, they changed the rules a year later.
I totally agree with all your comments regarding the creeping suburbanisation in our rural areas, and as I said in my post above, I think that agriclutral land must be protected. (add the airport extension to your list).
We have a conflict of interests here though. We need more people to get back into growing food to make us less vulnerable to food shortages and we need to protect our agricultral land. We need to find a way to achieve both.
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Another downside of using the bus
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Rosie
You’ve grown up here, as I have. You know as well as I do that you can’t build sheds in fields. I simply don’t believe that someone would have said ‘yeah alright, as long as you tuck it behind the hedge’
As for fallow fields; the Jersey model ensures that agri land is kept in the industry – private landowners can’t sit on fields and do nothing with them.
Agricultural fields, in my view, are for the agricultural industry. If people want to expand some of the old green house sites (horticultural) into allotments or home grown produce then there are still plenty around; but not green, pastural fields – industry only, dobbin at a push.
I think we generally agree with each other – sort of :-)
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Rosie, i think you are wrong about the field being out of farming for several years!
Neil, spot on ,its about time that land was stopped being lost out of farming, it has gone on for long enough with the horsey brigade buying a field because little Jessica/tarquin wants a pony, now the latest craze is sticking a row of cabbages in a field and calling it an allotment , lets have proper areas for allotments, or better still lets see the change of use law applied a little bit more often to curb this loss of land.
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Why do people bother applying for planning permission? I’ve got a few park benches and a few huge sheds in my garden, luckily I have two giant Oaks covering them so they cannot be seen via Digimap.
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So the lack of farming in Guernsey is because there is a lack of land?
Nothing to do with the fact, people can buy imported produce cheaper, EU subsidies to farming etc etc. I don’t necessarily agree with it but thats the reality. It’s not Jessica or Tarquins pony that has ruined farming in Guernsey.
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It never ceases to amaze me that despite the fact our island was originally a farming community, there is little to no provision for the increasing demand for proper allotments within which people can grow their own.
In the UK, there are quite literally waiting lists of people wanting allotments who can’t get them due to lack of land, meanwhile, over here, we’re surrounded by the stuff, but our authorities are doggedly determined to stay firmly behind the times, play by the rules (which do not take this relatively new movement’s needs into account) and not take any notice of the growing (your own) movement which has so captured people’s imaginations over the past 10 years or so….
sad, but unsurprising, when you bear in mind that the only sort of ‘carats’ our leaders really care about is the one’s locked away in bank vaults, ay….?!
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This field has always been used for agriculture, mainly let for cows to graze. No vegetables have been grown, sorry, a patch of dying bits and pieces a couple of metres. No intentions have been made to grow properly in a field that now has at least six trees planted IN the centre of the field, oaks etc. The shed is clearly visible from the road, so was the picnic bench and barbeque! The field next door is no better, at least an attempt has been made to grow, but it is noted that a LARGE shed seems to have been reduced in size and relocated else where on the plot. These were wonderful fields up until a short time ago, in a very picturesque area of St Peters. What else in this island is going to be ruined?
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If Roger’s name had been, say, Rodney and he wanted to change the use of prime agricultural land near Landes du Marche in Castel, he would have got permission to build a huge shed on it.
I’m sure we can all give examples where big, high value developments get approved but the letter of the law is applied to small, low or no profit projects. Draw your own conclusions.
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Neil.
I think that we do agree on this one. I think that you are right that ex horticultural sites ideally should be used first and agricultural fields kept for farming/growing.
There are a few problems with this though. Correct me if I am wrong, but I have heard that those sites very rarely come up since many owners are sitting tight hoping that if they allow the greenhouse to decay into the ground, the land will be so contaminated with glass that planning permission will eventually be given thus increasing the value of the site. Another problem is the huge expense of buying old greenhouse sites because on top of the price of the site, is the HUGE cost of clearing out the dilapidated glass houses. If the greenhouse is an old wooden one, the soil is also often contaminated because of the 70% lead paint that they used to use, not to mention the gung-ho use of chemicals they used to use on the plants.
As Scarlet points out, there is a huge increase in the ‘grow your own’ movement, and I think that we would be sensible to find ways to facilitate and encourage this because left as we are, we will become increasingly vulnerable to food shortages in the years to come, not to mention the hardships that will increase as food prices escalate.
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