York hotelier slams planners' red tape

A Yorkshire hotelier has hit out at the planning bureaucracy which is costing him hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of business every year.

Colin Bell, who owns Bilbrough Manor Country House Hotel near York, said he had suffered a five-year nightmare of planning problems thanks to the "excessive involvement of unelected quangos".

To ensure the 12-bedroom Bilbrough Manor thrives as a business, Mr Bell has been seeking permission for a 14-bedroom extension, car parking and a new access road.

Despite redrafting his proposals several times and winning the support of local planning officers and amenities groups, his latest application has just been rejected by the planning committee of Selby District Council as the property is on Green Belt land.

The saga began four years after Mr Bell purchased the property in 1986 for £460,000, and spent a further £400,000 extensively restoring the listed building.

It became clear, he said, that a country house hotel needed 30 bedrooms to be a viable business. After working through the labyrinth of committees and regulations he submitted his first planning proposal in 1992.

But people in the nearby village passionately objected to the plans, forming an action committee that lobbied councillors and local newspapers.

Despite the hotel contributing about £500,000 to the local economy each year and providing 34 jobs, the initial proposal, and those made since, have been rejected.

Mr Bell, who estimates he had to turn away £330,000 of business last year, has written to the prime minister and taken his case to appeal with the Department of the Environment, all to no avail.

The situation was particularly galling, he said, given the council's policy of developing tourism in the area. The local plan states that Selby needs more small-scale hotel developments to compete with the tourist centre of York.

"The anti brigades have too much say in business proposals like ours," said Mr Bell. "It appears to me that the understanding of planning law varies throughout the land according to the pressures that are placed on the powers that be."