Jan Higgins wrote:To me from an unbiased position this seems more like a case of someone who has moved here not wanting this business anywhere near them even though they live in the town.
Jan, just to appraise you of the correct facts. We moved to Dover and our house 8 years ago in 2013, in fact for my husband it was moving back to Dover where he lived in the late 70's.
The site was not given planning permission to operate as a public car wash till September of 2014, so to be correct, the car wash was imposed on us after we moved to the house, despite a large amount of objections from local residents, the Town Council, The Dover Society, Kent Highways and even the DDC’s own planning case officer, who stated for the record that the DDC’s planning committee should not grant planning. Still the planning committee granted planning permission, even after what can only be described the most dubious planning application form I have ever seen being put before a council. The planning committee also knew that the house was about to be upgraded by English Heritage to Grade Two Star listed status, so instead of waiting to hear from English Heritage they rushed the planning through, well knowing that the odds of getting acceptance of a car wash in a conservation area and adjacent to a Grade Two Star listed building past a Judicial Review was virtually zero.
Then in early April of 2016 the car wash closed operation, mired in a Modern Day Slavery employment scandal.
From 2016 till December 2019 the site operated a vehicle leasing business and would wash around 10 vehicles a week (not around the 200+ or so vehicles that are washed per week on the site now). The washing during the vehicle-leasing business time took place in the bay at the North of the site, and the site was run in accordance with all its conditions of planning bar one. At the time of the vehicle lease activities on the site we did raise questions about the pollution created by the washing of vehicles on the site as there had been no provision made, since planning permission had been granted, by the site owners for disposal of hazardous waste - DDC ignored the concerns we raised.
In March 2020 Mr Pishtiwan Karim leased the site from the freeholder and reopened it as a car wash.
Mr Karim has chosen to operate the site in breach of all bar one of his planning conditions, as it suits him better to operate the site that way, never mind the consequences to others.
Mr Karim has also chosen to breach planning law related to signage and to what businesses can be legally operated from the site, he also chose to ignore Environmental law.
All these breaches knowingly perpetrated by Mr Karim and the blind eye turned by DDC to these breaches add up to dragging Dover backward, not forward - they damage the Castle Conservation Area, they damage both the fabric and setting of the adjacent listed building, they damage the health and residential amenity of the adjacent residents and they damage the environment, they also damage the reputation of Dover in the eyes of the world and could possibly even endanger any new UNESCO status by way of DDC’s failure to protect and enhance its listed assets and the local environment.
