New Information Comes To Light

This information relates to the breach report made to the council in October 2022, regarding the addition of a full blown madrassa, to go with the existing mosque operating at Hamptons.

The council began their investigation, and asked the Chelmsford Muslim Society to supply full information about the madrassa, which they did not do.

In December 2022 , Planning Enforcement served a Planning Contravention Notice, which legally compelled CMS to supply the request information.

BUT CMS DIDNT REALLY COMPLY, and the council did nothing !

In our opinion, the CMS response is vague and misleading, and there is key information missing, this is an offence under Section 171D of the Town And Country Planning Act 1990

Quite how the council was able to arrive at an informed decision is still a mystery to us, but maybe the council was influenced by the rather hostile complaint made by the new legal representatives for CMS.

Sadly this passive/aggressive type of response has been used all over by the country by religious groups wishing to build or operate large places of worship.

THe missing information

Now all of this would be vital, to make an informed decision about if a change of use had occurred:

• A full timetable of religious uses

• A full timetable of religious educational uses

• A full timetable of non-religious uses

All of this was asked for, but not really provided in an open and transparent matter. We’d describe the answers at best as “evasive”. You can read the full Planning Contravention Notice responses here.

But perhaps the site visit yielded valuable information.

SITE VISIT Wednesday 29th March 2023

Now regular readers will know what’s coming here. The site visit was carried out mid-week and during office office hours, at a time and date pre arranged with CMS.

Bearing in mind that the breach report relates to the escalation of religious/religious education use, why would you not visit at the times when the religious use/religious education use is actually taking place ?

But here’s what officers found (or didn’t find).

The pattern of deliberate incompetence continues

Now this isn’t the first time that a site visit has been deliberately botched, over the last three years Planning Enforcement have :

• Tipped off CMS about breach reports (see image below)

• Failed to use their legal powers of entry to carry out surprise visits

• Tipped off CMS about “surprise” enforcement visits.

• Carried out surveillance and observations at times when they’d never see any evidence of worship

• Failed to make CMS comply fully with the Planning Contravention Notice from December 2022

• Failed to properly consider information supplied by residents

“Based on the information available at the time”

And this is the key phrase in all the council’s decisions relating to the Hamptons Mosque, but if you deliberately don’t fully investigate, and allow CMS to be vague and evasive, then the information available at the time will never allow for an informed and legal decision to be made;

AND that suits the councils woke agenda, as offended Muslims are a bad optic.

KBO