Ann Court Planning Application (FOI)

Request

This request concerns the Planning Application (P/2017/0730) submitted by Andium Homes Limited as applicant (agent: Axis Mason Limited) which was validated on 2 June 2017 and approved on 30 January 2018. The application was to construct 130 x 1-bed and 35 x 2-bed residential units on the Ann Court site in St. Helier.
Several of the floor and site plans submitted by the agent in 2017 in respect of this application have been studied by myself. However, they fail to reveal the size in square metres of any of the flats in terms of their net floor area and any additional internal or external storage space. Submission of the floor sizes of planned homes would presumably be an essential part of a planning application because minimum floor space standards for new dwellings are stated in Supplementary Planning Guidance Policy Note 6 (Table 2). I have compared the plans submitted for Ann Court with plans submitted by other architects for several similar social housing developments and these other applications generally show the net floor area of each flat in some form. Some of them include typical flat layouts where there are more than just one standard size of flat. There are over 200 documents submitted in respect of the Ann Court development so it is not feasible for me to personally read every page of every document. It is possible that the information regarding net floor areas of all the flats is included somewhere in a document that I have not been able to view.
However, due to the difficulty in finding this information, I request you provide me with the net floor area and storage measurements (in square metres) for all of the 130 x 1-bed flats and 35 x 2 bed flats on the Ann Court site, showing the location, by block and by floor level, of each individual flat.

Response

The information requested is publicly available on www.gov.je  in the 'Design and Access Statement – Part 2' (pages 7 & 8), which was submitted with (P/2017/0730) and published as one of the 65 supporting documents to this planning application.

 Planning application search (gov.je)

As the information is accessible by other means, Article 23 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 applies.

Article applied

Article 23 - Information accessible to applicant by other means

Information is absolutely exempt information if it is reasonably available to the applicant, otherwise than under this Law, whether or not free of charge.

A scheduled public authority that refuses an application for information on this ground must make reasonable efforts to inform the applicant where the applicant may obtain the information.