S Liverpool residents fear councillors will be told to vote again after rejecting damaging depot application

Planning committee voted to reject Peloton’s application that would mean 1,000 more lorries per day – but protest planned after unelected planning officers call new meeting

The L19 Action Group in Garston, south Liverpool, last month won a major victory against Liverpool’s right-run Labour city council after councillors on the city’s planning committee, after hearing almost two thousand objections from local people, voted against an application by the company Peloton for a massive new container storage depot in the heart of a community already blighted by some of the worst respiratory disease rates in the country.

The rejected Peloton would have created a huge open storage area the size of more than six football pitches on the old Garston Industrial estate, mere metres from homes and a school and would have led to additional traffic of around 1,000 lorries per day passing through the area, with obvious impacts on air quality, road surfaces, congestion and safety.

That the application be refused, reasons being the type and frequency of traffic associated with the facility, together with the noise and hours of operation associated with the operation of the site which is near to a residential area and the detriment to residential amenity.

Liverpool council planning committee.

This the first time in living memory that a Liverpool planning committee voted against a proposal recommended by planning officers and came as a literal breath of fresh air to residents who have already had a huge, highly explosive volatile waste recycling plant forced on them by the same planning officers and council – one recycling the same waste that caused the massive and lethal Flixborough disaster – but around six times larger than Flixborough and in the middle of a Liverpool housing estate instead of in the Lincolnshire countryside, and with an estimate blast radius of around 5 miles.

The elected councillors on the committee, a mix of Labour, Liberals and LibDems, took residents ‘ fears about the latest plan on board and voted to protect them – but unelected Planning Officers have refused to accept the democratic decision and are holding another planning meeting to try again to push the same plan through. This meeting will be held at Liverpool’s Town Hall at 9.45am next Tuesday, 13 May.

The community’s L19 Action Group will be at this meeting to support the councillors and demand that the rejection of the application is upheld, along with local democracy and the health and wellbeing of local people, and will also be demonstrating outside the Town Hall and welcome supporters able to join them in resisting anti-democratic and corporatist influences on the council.

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