A Broughty Ferry woman has spoken of her anger after a Dundee City Council blunder led to the construction of an ”industrial”-sized garage at the end of her garden.
Eileen Reoch owns one of several properties surrounding 30C Albany Road, where a large, two-storey garage was built last year.
But Dundee City Council failed to issue a neighbourhood notification letter (NNL) to nearby residents, denying them a chance to object to the proposals.
Mrs Reoch said: ”Basically, I woke up one morning last April to find a warehouse under construction at the bottom of my garden. We then found out that planning permission had been granted by the council 10 months before but none of my neighbours had received notification because the council had failed its statutory procedures.”
Although the council has admitted it failed to notify neighbouring properties and has been investigated by the public services ombudsman as a result the garage will stay.
The council had prepared NNLs but failed to post them. New systems have been put in place to ensure there can be no repeat of the situation. Two planning officers will have to confirm that notifications have been issued before an application can proceed.
Mrs Reoch said: ”If there had been six or more objections then they would have had to be heard at a full council meeting but as that didn’t happen it just went through.
”A lot of us are pretty aggrieved as we never had a chance to say anything about it. Even if we had been able to object and the council approved it, at least we would have had our say.”
To rub salt in their wounds, the garage was not built to the specifications laid out in the original planning application. Further alterations, such as a hoist to lift motorcycles on to the top floor, were rejected by councillors at the council’s planning committee when they considered a second application. This time neighbours were allowed to have their say.
”I think a lot of the councillors were surprised that such an industrial building had been allowed in a residential and conservation area,” Mrs Reoch said.
The ombudsman’s report stated: ”The council acknowledged and apologised for the failure to send out the specific neighbourhood notification letters.”
It added: ”Our inquiries to the council confirmed that they had fully acknowledged the error in relation to the neighbourhood notification letters and had taken remedial action to put a new system in place that would prevent any application progressing until two different officers had confirmed that neighbourhood notification letters had gone out.”