Builder gets further knock-back over Leominster house

A Herefordshire builder has had more unwelcome news in his 15-year-long battle to build on a prominent spot in a Herefordshire town.

Herefordshire Council has taken the unusual move of declining to determine the latest application after a long-running saga over a four-bedroom house.

In February, Martin Rohde applied to replace two incomplete semi-detached houses at Duke’s Walk, between the Grange park and Etnam Street in Leominster, with a single “1.5-storey”, four-bedroom house.

Unlike the current all brick-faced building, its replacement was to be finished with timber boarding above the ground floor, and would have had small enclosed gardens to the north and south.

The council had previously refused an application on the same site but, a statement accompanying the bid, said: “Following significant consultation with Herefordshire Council planning department, the current proposal is deemed satisfactory as a replacement for the current refused building.”

Despite this claim, an unnamed planning officer declined to determine it, saying the council was entitled to do so under planning law, as the site is still subject to an enforcement notice.

Earlier, Leominster Civic Society said it objected to Mr Rohde’s proposal “on the same grounds as previous, unsuccessful, applications”, namely that it went against the town’s agreed planning policy on new buildings and protecting its central conservation area.

Mr Rohde had previously sought, unsuccessfully, to gain acknowledgement that work on the house had begun within the timeframe of a previous planning approval granted in 2011. But the council disputed this, and maintained that what he ended up building differed from what had been approved.

A planning inspector concluded last June that “the planning permission was not commenced” at the time Mr Rohde claimed, so the council had been entitled to refuse his bid for a certificate of lawful development.