Residents of Meryon Court, Rye, summarised their complaints about the development at 53 Cinque Ports Street in this submission to Rother's planning committee councillors. These are their seven key concerns, currently:
- Unauthorised changes in design for windows facing 1 to 4 Meryon Court and omission of previously confirmed obscure glass that the planning officer said would be a condition to prevent overlooking Meryon Court bedrooms
- Unauthorised changes to provision for inspection and maintenance access of party wall, raising doubts on effectiveness of health, safety and environment factors. In particular, failure to consult on change from repointing wall to a sub-standard second wall of bricks, thus removing access and creating health, safety and environmental risks
- Inaccurate drawing (351D) understating height of garden walls to 3 and 4 Meryon court thereby understating by at least one metre the impact on those properties. As confirmed by planning officer’s email: “It is unfortunate that it appears that the height of the party wall had been misrepresented on the original approved plans, thus skewing how the plans may have been interpreted”
- Inaccurate drawing (352C) indicating previous building roof lines for demolished Central Garage building and earlier approved plans where no such roof line existed
- Unauthorised change in pitch and raising of roof line facing 1 and 2 Meryon Court
- Unauthorised raising of roof line such that a previous half-metre protrusion above garden walls of 3 and 4 Meryon court is now approximately two metres above the walls (see photograph below)
- Notice of planning proposal to approve retrospectively the unauthorised changes without availability of all relevant drawings until the eleventh day of the 21-day consultation period. This indicates incorrect planning procedures, since it is not credible that the drawings were not available on time because the builders had already built the unauthorised structures.