A FARMER is fighting an enforcement notice ordering the removal of a caravan used as a home for a worker on land at Ringwood.
Richard Pierson, of Moortown Farms Ltd, has been ordered by New Forest District Council to clear the caravan and “personal items and paraphernalia (such as barbeque and outdoor furniture etc) relating to it”.
The council says there has been no planning application for a change of use for the green belt land at Moortown Farm from storage to residential.
Moortown Farm in Ringwood – pic Google Earth
NFDC says the breach of planning control has occurred within the last ten years. It also said an “essential need for a rural worker to live permanently at their place of work in the countryside has not been demonstrated”.
It said the development is “unauthorised and visually harmful” considering its location within open countryside. There would also be “impacts” on “sensitive” nature conservation sites, the authority said.
The enforcement notice gives Mr Pierson a year to remove the caravan.
But planning company Stags, based in Exeter, is appealing the decision on his behalf, saying that twelve months is “unreasonable” and makes “no logical sense”.
It says Mr Pierson engaged with the council after it first “raised the problem” in 2022, but that the authority “appeared to lose interest” and the farmer did not hear from it again until October 2023.
The council claims that a new line manager and a review of outstanding cases led to the delay. The farmer then applied to be allowed to provide residential accommodation on the land, in the form of a caravan which he says has been in-situ and “largely unremarked” upon for the last ten years.