Dowell
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MU
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• The Transport Tribunal has set aside a decision by former Eastern Licensing Authority John Mervyn Pugh because the absence of understandable reasons for that finding was highly unsatisfactory.
The present Eastern Licensing Authority, Brigadier Compton Boyd, has reheard a licence application from Alexander Dowell Junior — but has reserved his decision.
This means that Dowell will have to wait to find out whether he can continue to operate nine vehicles and trailers from the Suffolk village where he has been based for 24 years.
At a two-day public hearing mid-Suffolk District Council and seven local residents opposed the renewal of Dowell's licence to operate from a site at Mill Lane, Woolpit, Bury St Edmunds.
Evidence was given by an acoustics expert that the noise from vehicles using Mill Lane was sufficient to disturb sleep. Vibration was said to have I damaged a nearby house and it
was alleged that 38-tonne artics had to mount the pavement while negotiating the junction of Mill Lane and Heath Road to avoid damaging the house.
Dowell, who trades as A Dowell & Son (Berry), told Boyd that he was operating fewer vehicles than before and that he thought he could recall planning permission being granted for the use of the site as a haulage company base. The council, however, denied having any record of any such permission.
Boyd felt that Dowell was unable to use the law's protection of existing operating centres because he had previously held the licence in the Metropolitan area before the definition of an operating centre was changed from being the place where the business was controlled. His site had never been listed on an operating centre licence held in the Eastern Traffic Area.
Douglas Sharpes, managing director of Sound Research Laboratories, disagreed with the criteria used by the council's expert for assessing the noise levels.
He said a survey indicated that stamping a foot a metre away from the Jones's house produced almost twice the vibration of a passing lorry.
For Dowell, Geoffrey Stephenson said the haulier's livelihood was at stake, and ponted out that other residents in the vicinity, in exactly the same position as the representors, had not complained.