After 14 months of persistent slog, the unauthorised steel palisade prison, painted an "Invisible" green and encroaching by three feet onto the residential easement of 15 properties whilst entombing precious Flood Zone 3 land finally came down.

So is this at last a cause for celebration? I think not!!

For as the whole parcel of this stolen and now flattened land was suddenly freed from its imprisonment with the Enforcement Officer and our Erewash Borough councillor in attendance, at almost the same time another steel palisade prison was duly erected around the site, one of the legal height limit that did not require planning permission to be there - so it is now a permanent fixture until presumably Adverse Possession is claimed for this land. The very same actions that EBC enforcement wrote six months ago and told me would happen has now happened. How very conveniently thought out! EBC enforcement even gave Rayden Engineering permission to erect the replacement fencing back on our established easement as he had not seen any maps to show its precise location, despite me having copied and passed on to the EBC solicitor copious amounts of maps, including Rayden Engineering’s own Title Deeds in which this boundary was quite clearly marked and despite all of the EBC parties concerned having held meetings to discuss courses of action.

The police had been on 24- hour standby as they had been informed by our industrial nightmare that he expected trouble and sure enough a police van came down and threatened my placid neighbour with arrest for, and wait for it, twiddling a piece of string! As he had stood on OUR LAND and defiantly tweaked the string line for the replacement fencing. I suppose it’s a good job we didn’t try to reclaim our land back, we might have been shipped off to Siberian salt mines for the offence.

Interestingly the first unauthorised extension by Rayden Engineering onto a large tract of land adjoining our miniscule parcel of entombed land, is land actually owned by the Crown, aka Erewash Borough Council. This EBC land also has a drainage culvert running across it which has a significant weight of scrap metal piled on top of it. According to a water board official the land owner is responsible for the culvert. The run-off from this land onto the unauthorised hard standing with no drainage also contributed to our homes flooding. As the land owner, Erewash Borough Council was responsible for both and had a duty to prevent the escape of water from their land causing a neighbouring nuisance through trespass. Yet they stood idly by and did nothing.

At precisely the same time on this fateful day, the Appeal against refusal of retrospective planning permission was accepted by the Planning Inspectorate. Apparently the out of time Appeal mentioned earlier in the Saga was against the invalid Enforcement Notices that had been served 7 days after we flooded.

When Rayden Engineering first applied to EBC for retrospective planning permission, he had knowingly and wrongly cited me as being the legal land owner. This was only discovered during a meeting with EBC planning to discuss the application otherwise I would never have known. This discrepancy was supposed to have been cleared up long since, but instead Rayden Engineering has continued to falsely cite me as being the legal land owner on both sets of Appeal documentation and throughout the whole farcical process. Surely any developer submitting false documents to support a planning application would deem the whole application to be invalid from the start? How on earth has he managed to arrive at this stage in the planning process based upon fraudulent documents?

Of course the council opted for a written representation type of Appeal, despite the issues being complicated enough to warrant a proper examination in public where cross examination of the expert witness employed by Rayden Engineering on flood issues would have been allowed and despite planning inspectorate guidelines recommending a hearing type of Appeal as more appropriate for this type of case.

How ironic that I have intensively studied flood plain development at academic level and was in an ideal position to cross examine this expert witness who states in his Report that there is no flood risk and the last time we flooded was in fact 1922. Flood plain maps have been altered, drainage and sewer maps show a completely different area and our tiny terraced road looks like the M1 motorway as the result of a wide angle lens photograph. A report riddled with so many inconsistencies and discrepancies it is only marginally better than the original amateur efforts written by Rayden Engineering themselves. A report I was not going to be allowed a copy of from EBC as it would "Infringe copyright laws". A public domain report that we gained copies of by pure luck.

How ironic that Rayden Engineering states that there will be no noise or dust or disturbance and the carefully amassed video evidence of the last 14 months which shows the exact opposite will also be buried as video evidence is not allowed at a written procedure inquiry. How very convenient that both of these facts were known by both Erewash Borough Council and Rayden Engineering - talk about burying the evidence!

The sequence of events are all just a little too convenient and it appears to us that we have all gone through a process which would be more aptly called "Being seen to be democratic" without actually arriving anywhere and being devoid of any positive conclusion despite the overwhelming evidence.

Still we are all greatly reassured that we will not flood again. How do we know this? Why the expert employed by Rayden Engineering has stated we will not flood in his commissioned report.

Perhaps the expert witness has accurately predicted the British weather a little better than the meteorologists appear to do and it might not rain at all this Winter!

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