Travellers ordered to leave illegal site after landowner loses High Court ruling - Berkshire

From Get Reading

The clock will start ticking for Travellers living on an illegal site after the landowner was refused permission to appeal a High Court ruling to evict his tenants.

Felix Cash opened up his mobile home park at Pine Ridge, Nine Mile Ride, Crowthorne, for the homeless because he felt their needs were not being met by the council.

However, in October 2012 he failed to convince a High Court to overturn Wokingham Borough Council’s demands to evict the occupants within 18 months after the site was deemed a breach of planning control.

His latest legal fight, to challenge that decision at London’s Court of Appeal, fell through on December 12.

Lord Justice Richards refused permission for Cash to challenge the ruling at a full hearing and said he had “no real prospect of success” on any appeal.

The judge added the complaints put forward “amount to a re-run of the way the case was put below”, and also refused Cash permission to challenge the Deputy Judge’s order that he must pay more than £10,000 in legal costs to the Secretary of State and the council.

While he expressed concern about the level of the costs, he said they were “not so obviously excessive” as to justify an appeal on that issue alone.

Mr Cash had argued during the proceedings that he set up the 22 caravan park to house vulnerable homeless people considered a low priority on the council’s housing list.

He claimed some had been waiting more than seven years for a home until he opened the site.

He hoped to win a ruling forcing the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to have his case reconsidered, giving him another chance at securing planning permission.

The council insisted the park was a breach of planning control, and issued the enforcement notices demanding he remove the caravans, as well as hard-standing, utilities and a fence at the site.

Mr Cash’s original appeal to that order was refused by a Government planning inspector in April 2011.

It was then that the inspector gave the residents 18 months to get off the site.