#Update 23 New committee date

St Christopher's plans due to go before councillors on August 9th at 2pm.

You may remember the developers pulled out of the last meeting in May - and complained about the report by planning officers which recommended refusal for their scheme. 

We have gone through their complaints with a fine toothcomb and debunked their spurious claims. You can read what we said here. And what our planning consultant says here.

Some of it is inevitably quite technical but their complaints just do not stack up. In a nutshell - we maintain the developers are failing to provide the public benefit they claim. And they are certainly not solving Bristol’s housing crisis either. They seem to completely fail to understand the guidance of council policies on heritage, density, sustainability, trees, and parking.

Our conclusion states:

“In our view, the applicant’s rebuttal is inaccurate, unbalanced and unfair - it is entirely without merit and nothing more than a desperate eleventh hour attack on hard working city council officers who have spent the best part of two years providing the applicant with wise and helpful advice on how to develop this site in a sensitive and appropriate way; advice that the applicant has chosen to ignore. The applicant has consistently failed to provide sufficient, accurate, up to date and detailed information when requested, and appears to be hell bent on maximising housing units and profit for shareholders over heritage, environment, sustainability and the delivery of social wellbeing to the community of Bristol. It is startling to see that the applicant has the audacity to claim this application will deliver ‘public benefit’ when the reverse is the case. In reality this application rides roughshod over a whole range of Bristol City Council policies, our community and our city.”

So we hope the officer's report will stick to their guns and continue to recommend refusal. 

We appreciate lots of you may well be away in August  (there seems to be a theme here doesn't there?....) but SCAN will be there in force and doing our best to get people’s voices heard.

We will update you as soon as we know more - and also provide you with more info about how to submit a statement to the meeting if you want to.

We very much hope the developers will not pull out of this next meeting and will face the committee and the community and hear what we have to say.