A Monthly Publication

Hunstanton Cliff Top Resident’s Association

The first Annual General Meeting of the Association was held at the Town Hall Thursday 24 May 2007.   An encouraging number of residents attended.

The Chairman, Mr John Burgess, presented his report on the activities of the Committee to the meeting.

He pointed out that the Association was formed to combat an undesirable development of the area within the Cliff Top Area.  The Committee’s main work had been trying to stop the development of the Green Shutters site.  He outlined the work the Committee had carried out to get this development stopped at the full planning stage.  We had notification of this which asked for our views and comments by a specified date.  We requested that the hearing be delayed as the Council would not have had time to consider our response as the date for comments was the same day as the Development Control Board meeting.  In spite of our efforts, the council decided to go ahead with their proposed meeting.  Our comments were duly delivered to the Council offices prior to the meeting in accordance with their request.  However, these comments were not commented on by the Planning Officer or the Development Board.  We had good representation made by Councillor Eric Linge and Councillor Richard Bird together with my report.

  A site visit was requested but this was not taken up by the Development Board.  Prior to the Development Council Board meeting we met with the following people:

· Mr John Dobson (Chairman of the Council)

· Mr Eric Linge (Town Councillor)

· Mr Richard Searle (Borough Councillor)

Kenneth Bush & Co (our legal advisors)

All of these people agreed with our actions thus far.

During this time we took legal advice as to our position before and after the decision was given for the go ahead on the Green Shutters Site.  Our Barrister felt that we had an extremely good case for a judicial review but since we were likely to incur costs exceeding £25,000 we had to reluctantly decide to go no further.

We also put our objections to the way the Planning Department had dealt with our correspondence to the Ombudsman for his consideration.  These are being considered at the moment by the Ombudsman and our latest information is that the Council has requested further time to fully reply to him.  The Ombudsman is to contact us later this month with his findings on the way the planning Department acted.  We can only hope that he will find that the Council did not act in accordance with their laid down rules in dealing with our comments and correspondence.

The Chairman went to inform the meeting that our greatest strengths lay in the unity of our organisation and it may be that the whole Town will eventually need some pressure group to prevent unwanted development in our town which we regard as one of the finest areas in which to live and work.  The whole meeting showed their appreciation of the work carried out during the short space of being formed.

The meeting was then open for comments from the floor and the following items were raised and discussed:

1. Parking of Caravan/Mobile homes.

Many members expressed their concerns about caravans/mobile homes being parked along Cliff Parade, down side streets and in various squares in the town.  Many of these vans appeared on many weekends parked on the Cliff Parade during the day then moved into areas such as Queens Drive for the night and back onto Cliff Parade the following day.  Some followed this procedure for 4 or 5 days.  At other times there would be some 4 or 5 vans regularly parked nose to tail and congregating on the grass area of the Cliff treating this as a caravan site.

2. Parking of vehicles on parts of the road on the Cliff Top which had restricted parking.

3. Speeding

Speeding along Cliff Parade and Northgate, Barnard Crescent and Bernard Avenue.  These roads appeared to be used as race tracks by some motorists (even residents)

4. Lack of use of available parking for visitors

The other concern was that parking was allowed to take place without any control by police/traffic wardens.  The Car Park on the Cliff Top Light House was nearly always empty together with the car park in the Tesco Area, whilst the side streets of the town were crammed with vehicles paying nothing for their parking – on some occasions blocking people into their houses by parking in front of their driveways.