What goes up must come down.

Congratulations to Cllr. George Fairhurst of Standish, near Wigan for spotting a new block of flats that was too high, by 5 foot. Now the only way this could have been spotted was surely not with the naked eye? Mr. Fairhurst must have been checking this out with some surveying equipment or some such apparatus? In which case, did he have some kind of gripe with this development? Okay so the developers are in the wrong, they claim a 'Genuine' technical error. Afterall they built the building 5' too high. A Government Inspector had a look and has now made it quite clear the whole lot will have to come down and the foundations lowered. So, the loss of 14 flats at around £170,000 each is doubtless going to hurt the developer, Wainhomes North West. No one was complaining other than a jobs-worth councillor who thought he'd score some brownie points down at the Tory Party office in Wigan. Now an awful lot of energy has to go into pulling down these flats, lowering the foundations and rebuilding the structure. This really shows the planning system for what it is, an inflexible, out of date monument to red tapped jobs-worths. The structure one presumes wasn't going to fall down, no one had it seems noticed anything wrong with it apart from some councillor who probably went out with a load of survey gear to make sure the building was the right (wrong) height. Why couldn't the developer merely be fined for messing up? We often see reported in the newspapers stories about someone who built their house 2 foot too tall, out of line with what was agreed on plans, whatever, and yes whilst these people have plainly been served rather badly by their surveyors, planners or architects why can't some hard hitting fine be imposed instead of the very wasteful demolition and rebuilding of a structure? Rebuilding will just produce more pollution at a time that we are supposed to be cutting down on it, especially within the building industry.