There has been a lot of press coverage in the last few days about a planning decision of Broxtowe Borough Council taken at a meeting that I chaired, as well as a fair amount of uninformed comment.

The borough council received a planning application by a local resident to keep an enclosure he had erected to house two lions and a puma. In sixteen years on the council I had never come across anything like this before. I spoke to Lib Dem colleagues on planning committees up and down the country and no-one could recall seeing anything like this either, so we think it is fairly unique.

The first thing to say is that we were not being asked to decide whether someone could keep two lions and a tiger. These are wild animals and you can only keep them in this country if you hold a special licence to do so, and if the premises are licenced. The applicant has spent many years working with big cats and holds the necessary licences. The premises have also been inspected by the licensing team and they were satisfied that they were suitable for the animals it was planned would be housed there.

It was also not for the committee to decide whether it was right for wild animals to be kept in cages. These particular animals had all been bred in captivity and would never cope on the wild. The lions had been rescued from a circus in Europe by the applicant.

The enclosure where the animals were to live had already been built without planning permission. The question for the planning committee was whether we would retrospectively give it planning permission or not. I’m never keen on retrospective applications but I know that usually they are as a result of a genuine mistake, where people didn’t realise that planning permission was needed. It did mean in this case though that we could inspect the enclosure and see just how secure it is. It is built to zoo quality.

I had visited the site a few weeks ago to look at it and I arranged for the whole committee to have the opportunity to visit it on the day of the meeting, which most members did. I also met the animals and even got to stroke the lions. Just as the matters above weren’t planning features that should influence the committee neither was the fact that they were extremely cute and playful.

This application was in the green belt. An enclosure for wild animals is not considered as appropriate development in the green belt and so what the council had to consider was whether there were any special circumstances that would allow permission to be given.

There had been 14 letters of complaint from local residents as well as a number of letters of support. There had also been quite a lot of discussion on the comments section of the local newspaper. I read all of this with interest. The applicant said that he feared if planning permission was not given then the animals would have to be put to sleep. I wasn’t personally convinced by this, but equally I wasn’t convinced by some of the objections. For instance some people complained about the noise and smell. This enclosure is right next to the M1 motorway. The noise and smell from there greatly outweigh anything that would come from the site.

There were two things that I felt amounted to really special circumstances so that planning permission could be given. First the enclosure was well hidden from view, behind a fence and a hedge and out of sight of anyone. As a result it had no impact on the openness of the green belt. secondly the applicant had signed an undertaking agreeing that he would remove the enclosure when these animals either died or moved on, and so it was not going to be there in perpetuity. As a result I voted in favour of granting planning permission.

There was a lively debate on the night and some very useful points made. Overall the committee agreed with me and planning permission was granted by seven votes to five.

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