‘It stinks’: councillor attacks handling of Little Marlow quarry restoration

Buckinghamshire Council came under fire at a meeting on Thursday for flouting its own enforcement notice and seeming to shy away from commitments to fully restore a green space.

The Strategic Sites Committee was looking at an application to change the rules on an old planning permission for the site at Spade Oak.

The site, which has been referred to as Little Marlow Lakes Country Park for some time, used to be a working quarry and was always meant to be restored once extraction finished.

Wycombe District Council acquired the site for about £1million in 2019 and thus, Buckinghamshire Council now owns it.

The land came with substantial restoration conditions – the original quarry permission required the site to be restored by December 2012.

That did not happen, and the council issued an enforcement notice in 2022 to landowners for failing to comply.

This enforcement notice has still not been complied with several years later.

The current application (CM/0010/25) is asking to extend the deadline for the restoration to July 2027 and alter some of the conditions.

One of the most contentious conditions looks at how the site must be restored, especially the quality of the ground. The top layer must be filled with soil, not large, buried pieces of debris.

But Cllr Stuart Wilson, (IMPACT Alliance, Flackwell Heath & The Wooburns), had strong words to say about it, saying the application ‘stinks’.

He highlighted the strange situation whereby the enforcement notice applies to the council as the current landowner.

"What we have is Buckinghamshire Council, as the applicant, asking Buckinghamshire Council, as the planning authority, to approve a variation of conditions so that Buckinghamshire Council, as the landowner, can carry out significantly less restoration than originally required,” he said.

“You are being asked to approve a variation of conditions that effectively [lets] the council off the hook for an enforcement notice.

“If this were a private landowner in your ward, you would be appalled.

“You would demand compliance or pursue legal action. You would refuse permission until the original conditions had been met.”

He was not the only one to raise concerns about this.

Cllr Anna Crabtree (Lib Dem, Marlow) noted that the council was prepared to issue an enforcement notice against a third party who failed to comply with the same restrictions.

“The fact that the council was forced to serve itself … with an enforcement notice in 2022 – which has still not been complied with several years later – has a significantly eroded local trust in the council,” she said.

To comply with the condition to restore the quality of the soil, the landowner would likely need to remove hardstanding.

Cllr Crabtree raised the point that, if the council purchased the land knowing this, it was hard to justify not complying with this condition.

There is a desire to make the Little Marlow Lakes into a proper country park, she noted, and the various problems and delays are a cause for concern.

“It seems incredible that over 13 years later, we are still debating the same topic,” Cllr Crabtree said.

“I would like to ask the committee to consider fully why [the restoration is] being proposed to be delayed yet again.”

Chris Steuart, development management team leader, stated that the question of why the conditions were not met should not influence the planning decision; the committee must assess if the proposed scheme is acceptable based on planning policies.

In the end, the committee voted in favour of the application.