Deadline week - will we make it?

Pouring concrete - 16th April

The planning application that was approved on the 18th April 2006 expired after 3 years so we only had until Friday 17th April 2009 to begin the build. Officially, beginning appears to mean having the foundations poured. So, we had to make sure that we had everything finished by Friday night. Not only that, we still had not received approval for the planning conditions relating to materials to be used, landscaping, and boundary treatment. Technically we shouldn't start until this had been received.

With Easter out of the way, the groundworkers resumed on Tuesday by digging out the remaining trenches for the footings. Due to the depth required near the hedgerow (nearly 2 metres), this carried on into Wednesday too. Time was short - just two days to pour the concrete.

Thursday brought a very grey and wet day. I had to travel to Liverpool on business so had no idea what the weather was doing in Bedfordshire. Apart from a couple of short showers, Liverpool had remained mainly dry. I hoped Bedfordshire would be similarly so. It appears that this wasn't the case but the very wet groundworkers had plugged away in the rain and managed to get much of the concrete poured, but not all. Down to the wire then. Just one day to finish the footings.

Arriving home from site on Thursday night I found a letter from the solicitor representing the owner of the driveway. In a very vague and rambling sort of way it ultimately threatened us with an injunction if we didn't "desist from allowing heavy plant to use the driveway". Just for good measure there were various threats about our apparent demands to widen and strengthen the driveway- not sure where that came from although we do have to meet a certain specification for building regulations. All in all it appeared to be quite a desperate letter, written, we knew, not at the behest of the owner of the driveway, but as a result of the rantings of the increasingly manic farm manager - Stuart Rataj. It was quite a relief in a way as it showed that there was little substance to any of the previous claims, and no evidence of any sort offered to prove to whom the drive belonged, or to justify the basis of the claims. After all, if I owned land that someone else was claiming, I would simply produce my deeds to prove my claim. Whatever deeds exist for the driveway, if any, one can only assume that they are very vague and do not support the verbal claims being made.

We decided to ignore it for the time being and prayed for a drier Friday. Our luck held and Friday proved to be overcast but dry. However, I was unable to visit site and had a call Friday afternoon from the Building Surveyor to say that all the footings were complete and had been signed off by the building inspector. We had done it, except for one detail - we still hadn't received approval for the planning conditions. Hopefully, this wouldn't be a problem - after all we had given plenty of notice.

The second telephone call was altogether more serious though. It appeared that Stuart Rataj had turned up at the site and tried to stop the lorries delivering the concrete by parking his pick-up on private land that gave access to to the site. When challenged by Pete Robinson from number 5 Brookvale and told to move, he became very aggressive and refused. Pete didn't bother to argue for very long - he simply went indoors and telephoned the police whilst Stuart Rataj screamed at him from his pick-up. Now Pete was in the army - tank regiment - so doesn't frighten easily, and eventually Rataj drove wildly off and then parked up on the driveway out of everyone's way saying he was going to count every lorry that came and went (closet trainspotter perhaps?) After some time he seems to have got bored and left, only to return on foot some time later with a fellow parish councillor who started taking photos.

After a visit to site on Sunday where we had a first hand account of all this from our soon-to-be neighbours, I came home and checked the Mid Beds DC web site to see if any changes were recorded for the development. Amazing - there, dated the 14th April 2009 - was the approval for bricks, tiles, landscaping and boundary treatment. So we had complied - footings hadn't started being poured until the 16th, by which time approvals had been granted. Nothing there for the Parish Council to complain about then - what a relief.

Where to from here - well, off to the solicitors on Monday to hit back hard in response to the letter received from the drive owner's solicitor. I'm also pursuing the matter of vested interest not being declared by two parish councillors (Rataj being one of them) who have been most involved in opposing our development - maybe that'll quieten them down a bit, particularly when I seek compensation.

Mr Angry of Clifton