Anger over mobile homes as deer and badgers ‘threatened’

The St. Regis Park development on Bassetsbury Lane in High Wycombe officially opened on September 30, 2023, after Buckinghamshire Council granted planning permission for 40 houses on the site in 2019.

But the park homes estate, owned by Birch’s Group, has now filed for retrospective permission to build four more units and carry out “landscaping”.

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The new retrospective application has been ‘called in’ by Councillor Andrea Baughan, meaning it will now have to be decided by the Planning Committee.

It comes after local residents complained that swathes of trees along the site boundary were cut down, prompting the Council to investigate a potential planning breach.

Cllr Baughan said: “There is a lot of local concern with regard to this application – particularly with the retrospective element where the screened ‘buffer zone’ as it was originally called has been destroyed.”

Manu Sharma, who has lived opposite what is now St. Regis Park for 10 years, is among those concerned about the impact the proposed changes will have on wildlife.

He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS): “It is not fair what they have done. They have changed quite a few things, so many things which have been changed.

“It was supposed to be green land. It was a clear breach of the permission and some of the people who live there are not happy at this.”

The 50-year-old IT worker’s rosebush has been chewed up by deer after the animals were allegedly forced from the land St. Regis Park was built on.

He said: “There are deer in the front garden. This was their habitat. It is a really bad thing what they have done. The other day I saw the deer at two o’clock in the morning. They come here every other day now.

“It is not just planning breaches. They are killing the animals. They were always in the back but never in the front garden. Now they are moving around on the road at night. They are there when I try to get out of the car. They mainly act out of fear.”

Another nearby resident described interacting with the site owner and seeing deer in the garden of her detached house, which overlooks the park homes estate.

She said: “He comes down in his great big Rolls Royce. He was very nice and said he was a neighbour. But he doesn’t behave like one.

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“I love the deer, but they don’t half eat things. We have put up a boundary in our garden because they have been forced in.”

Communications worker Laura Taylor, 42, who has lived in a house neighbouring the site for 15 years, has major concerns about the site’s impact on wildlife.

She said: “The main issue is that he has got rid of the ecological buffer zone. He moved the slow worms, which are a protected species, into the ecological buffer zone. He has since then destroyed the ecological buffer zone.

“He knows exactly what he is doing. He is playing the Council. It is shocking. He is brazen about it. We have been videoing him chopping these trees down.

“It is disgusting. We are supposed to be saving the planet right now, not destroying it. We are in a city. There is not much green space. We are now looking out on plastic huts.”

Retirees Judith Grieve, 80, and her husband Robert, 79, have lived opposite the site of the new park homes for 40 years, and are opposed to more houses there.

Judith said: “We were not happy about it in the first place. People living there seem very happy, but we just think more on the site would be too many. It would be so overcrowded.

“It is the way he is going about it. It almost seems like the Council is being played.”

Birch’s Park Homes Ltd has been approached for comment.

To view the application in full type in 23/07198/FUL into the council’s planning portal.