Residents challenge scrapyard owner (From The Bolton News)

Residents challenge scrapyard owner

8:46am Thursday 17th January 2013 in News

ANGRY residents challenged the owner of one of Bolton’s biggest scrap merchants on the second day of a public inquiry.

Sean Chadwick, owner of SC Chadwick and Sons in Breightmet, is appealing against a decision by planners to block his proposals to extend the site.

Neighbours of the Oakenbottom Road site accused Mr Chadwick of flouting planning laws after he built two single storey buildings, a concrete boundary wall and four metal lighting columns.

Lynn Hailwood, a resident of Oakenbottom Road, spoke at the inquiry on behalf of Breightmet residents.

Mrs Hailwood, aged 48, said: “The fact that these buildings have already been erected with blatant disregard for due process or legality has increased the company’s operations, generated more business and significantly increased the volume, size and frequency of traffic traversing Oakenbottom Road over the past three years.”

But Mr Chadwick denied that the plans to expand to the northern site with an additional building for sorting waste would increase the amount of business going to and from the site.

Mr Chadwick, who bought the yard in 2002, said: “The plans were made to provide better amenities for the workforce, to make it safer for them and increase security on the site. We want to recycle more of the waste we receive and have zero landfill by 2013.

“Markets emerge all the time and the big thing at the moment is energy from waste.”

Planning consultant Alison Heine, representing Mr Chadwick, backed his claims.

She said: “The new building is not to increase the number of activities on the site, it is to modernise what is happening on the yard already.”

Town Hall chiefs served the scrapyard with an enforcement notice in July last year ordering all of the new structures to be demolished, but Mr Chadwick is refusing to back down.

The business employs 15 people, but Mr Chadwick says he could lose four if his appeal is unsuccessful.

He may also be forced to reduce the size of the compound wall from three metres to two metres.

The inquiry was adjourned until March 14.