Row over Overton land is 'vendetta' (From This is Hampshire)

Long-running squabble continues

3:00pm Thursday 18th October 2012 in News By Emily Roberts, Chief Reporter

A LONG-running squabble is continuing about a house plot that allegedly extends on to a playing field.

After its meeting last week, Overton Parish Council is to write to the chief executive of the borough council to ask why enforcement action has not been taken against a developer they claim has built a house on several feet of the Edward Kersley Playing Field.

But the developer has hit back saying the parish council has worked itself up into a “personal vendetta” against him.

In February, Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council said it could be forced to take legal action if no solution was found to the dispute about the boundary of the house in Red Lion Lane, Overton.

The approved plans apparently mean the house has encroached by several feet on to the borough council-owned playing field, which is leased to the parish council. The developer won a planning appeal last November to build the three-bedroom home.

At last week’s parish council meeting, Councillor Peter Baker said: “There’s a lot of resentment in the village.

If they take six feet of our park then they have gone over the line and we want a legal prosecution paid for by Basingstoke and Deane.”

Councillors agreed to write to borough council chief executive Tony Curtis about the matter.

But Steve Smith, of DGS Developments, told The Gazette it had been agreed with a borough surveyor that the boundary wall was “as accurately placed as was reasonable”.

He added: “The claim that the boundary wall is six feet into the playing fields is at best fanciful, at worst an attempt at political justification of this personal vendetta.”

He the firm’s solicitors had written to the borough council legal department but had received no details in reply.