Calls for more to be done on eyesore sites

Councillors have called on more to be done on getting empty buildings such as the Bull and Monkie and former hospital sites in Spalding tidied up and back in use.

A meeting of South Holland District Council’s Performance Monitoring Panel last week heard that the authority was planning a new policy on tidying up derelict sites.

But some councillors expressed concerns it didn’t go far enough and more compulsory purchase orders were needed to take control of sites that have been in a deteriorating state for decades.

Coun Andrew Tennant said: “I think this policy is a complete and utter waste of time because the council remains toothless. It doesn’t matter what kind of policy you have in place, if the council is not going to stick its neck out and say for once we can give you a notice to say if you do not improve that property within a month that’s ours and we’re repossessing it.

“Unless that happens all these dodgy developers and people living in Bangkok going to sit there laughing at us for the next 20 years.

“As far as I’m concerned, if that means it’s going to cost the council £50,000 then that’s £50,000 well spent.

“As an authority we have Welland Homes and South Holland Homes. We have building companies. Are you not telling me that someone could not stick their heads out and say for one of these big properties we’re talking about, that the council will buy it and turn it into flats?

“I’ve heard so many excuses from our planning department in the past. They’re quite logical reasons as to why they haven’t enforced this, but five years later the problem still exists.”

Executive manager for governance Mark Stinson argued it wasn’t quite that easy: “Yes we have the powers for a compulsory purchase order, but it requires Secretary of State’s approval and you have to have a thought out a scheme to deliver at the end of the order.

“It’s not a straightforward process of simply saying we’re fed up of seeing this run down property so we’ll place a compulsory purchase order on it.
“There’s quite a tortuous process and it’s not entirely into our own hands.”

Other councillors agreed that more should be done Coun Simon Walsh urged a taskforce be set up while Coun Jack McLean saying he was “disappointed” and “I would’ve expected we’d be more relentless”

The meeting’s chair Coun Bryan Allcock said: “It’s not easy but the authority has got to start to see how some of this can be unlocked.

“I accept how difficult a compulsory purchase order is.

“Somewhere along the line we have to somehow break this circle.

“We don’t have the funds. It may be difficult to find the funds and it may be difficult to find a solution but surely to goodness we’ve got to find a way out of this.

“Not only for the owners of the property, but surely for the district, with a lot of the sites being in highly sensitive areas.”