September 2016
Allerdale Borough council have issued Story Homes with a breach of conditions notice for working outside of our permitted working hours. Works took place on the highway adjacent to our development at Strawberry Grange on Saturday 9 September, before 8am, which is the permitted starting time.
Our investigations have identified that despite liaising with our contractors and confirming that no site activities were either programmed or authorised, we have been let down by a failure of our utilities contractor, Aptus Utilities, to communicate this successfully to their operations team.
Ian Storey, Managing Director for Story Homes said “We are really disappointed to find that our contractors have breached the terms of our planning condition. We have a process for approving weekend working and no works were programmed or authorised. Unfortunately, our contractors failed to follow this process and were working adjacent to our site without our knowledge. This in no way excuses the very early start which would not be acceptable on any day.
“We are working with our subcontractors across the board, to reinforce the message that this is simply not acceptable and to ensure everybody has an awareness and understanding so this doesn’t happen again. We would like to apologise to local residents for any inconvenience caused and reassure them that we are taking this very seriously.”
Andrew Reay, Aptus Utilities Construction Director said “We would like to apologise to local residents, Allerdale Borough Council and Story Homes for breaching the planning condition and working outside of the permitted hours. As a company we were aware of this restriction but we failed to pass this information on to our site team who were unaware of those restrictions. We have reviewed our internal processes and spoken to all involved which should ensure this does not happen again.”
