Condition 3 Compliance Memo

Department Of Infrastructure ### Memorandum To: Jennifer Chance, Development Control Manager From: Ian Brooks, Planning Officer Subject: Compliance of a condition – condition 3 of 11/00588/C – Partial change of use of building to provide office and storage facilities, Training Centre, Hills Meadow Industrial Estate, Douglas, IM1 5EB Date: 04/01/12 To consider a request to use the building for other office/storage uses in accordance with Condition 3 of Planning Permission 11/00588/C dated 25th November 2011. Condition 3 stated: "The approval hereby granted is only for the use of the premises by the Isle of Man Post Office for the office and storage purposes involved in the operation of a data capture and storage facility, and the premises shall not be used for any other office and storage purposes without the prior written approval of the Planning Authority." The applicant's agent has stated the following: "...based upon your advise we originally applied for the use of the site to be zoned as office and storage. This was due to the three activities that will be initially taking place on site. Firstly the primary business of data capturing and storage, second the disaster recovery site (zoned as office as per your advice) and thirdly the stationary store for the Post Office. Due to the addition of clause 3 of the planning approval for the former Training Centre at Hills Meadow, we request written permission for the use of: - The ground floor office area to be a Disaster Recovery Site housing banks of printers in storage in case of server failure at their other site. As previously discussed this will have no permanent staff but will consist of a small number of office size printers to provide short term support should anything happen at the main production facility at Postal Headquarters, Spring Valley Industrial Estate. - The ground floor storage facility to include stationary storage. This will constitute approximately 15% of the total floor area. All details of these items are as per our discussions in our previous telephone communications and in our emails to you dated 12/4/11, 13/4/11 and 14//4/11 all prior to submission of the planning application. As neither of the items will contravene the zoning nor be detrimental to the primary building use we do not foresee any problem with approving this but should you require any further information or wish to discuss the proposal do not hesitate to contact us." In my Committee Report, I explicitly stated the following: "The agent has stated that "The first floor structure is designed for office loading only and as such is unsuitable for any heavy storage or industrial usage. The purpose of the 1st floor will be for data capture services, operational process will include Mail opening, extraction, scanning and verification. The ground floor storage will provide archive facilities for the above operations hard copies, short-term stationery holding area and potential Post Office Stores. The ground floor office area will be for disaster recovery option for the Post Office IMS print and fulfilment and as such will not normally be manned. This building with a near 50-50 split between office space and storage is the ideal location for a business of this nature which requires exceptionally large quantities of storage in comparison to standard office requirements in order to function effectively." It would appear the Independent Inspector has only considered the operation of a data capture and storage facility, and has not considered the Disaster Recovery use and the storage of stationery when drafting condition 3 for the revised appeal decision. This is further supported by his statement in paragraph 43 of this report, which says "I consider that there should be another condition to limit the permission to use by the Isle of Man Post Office for office and storage facilities to be used for data capture and associated storage purposes." The applicant is now in unfortunate position by having to seek written approval for the above uses, as required under condition 3 of the permission, when they should have been considered at the time of the appeal. The storage of stationery is a storage use and would be acceptable within an area zoned as light Industrial. The disaster recovery site will be housing banks of printers in storage in case of server failure at their other site. The Planning Committee considered these uses to be acceptable when determining the application. I therefore recommend that the uses be approved. Signed. _________________________ Date. 4/1/12 Signed. _________________________ Date. 11. Summer 2012 Jennifer Chance Development Control Manager