ANOTHER gaffe by Thurrock Council has angered and worried councillors after it was revealed the authority had yet again put a plan to develop a site for council housing into the public domain without consulting the owners of the properties.

This week's meeting of the Housing Overview and Scrutiny Committee was given an update on sites that the council has earmarked as potential hosts for new council housing.

Housing development manager Keith Andrews briefed members of the addition of a garage site at Lyndhurst Road in Stanford-le-Hope which could be developed for up to 17 new homes.

The council owns the majority of the garages on the site, but five are in private ownership.

Councillors at the meeting expressed surprise when they were told that the owners were unaware of the council's plans and have not yet been contacted.

It has shades of the calamitous announcement under the same housing programme that the council wanted to annex homes in Orsett which it announced without telling their owners - causing consternation and a possible fall in the value of those residents' properties.

After blundering about the issue for several weeks and attending a public meeting where he was roundly condemned for the council's cack-handedness, housing portfolio holder Cllr Barry Johnson scrapped the plan in Orsett.

The revelation that owners at Lyndhurst Road had not been consulted surprised the overview and committee chair Cllr Luke Spillman who said it was 'worrying'.

The latest blunder came to light when Cllr Lynn Worrall quizzed Mr Andrews.

She said: "Is this the first that the people who own those garages will have heard about this? Have you written to them to tell them that you have added their garages onto a housing development site?"

Mr Andrews responded by saying: "Yes, they will be hearing directly from us", prompting Cllr Worrall to re-ask: "So they haven't yet?"

Mr Andrews conceded the point saying: "They haven't yet. The approach we took was that these aren't people's homes."

Cllr Worrall said: "If I was a garage owner I would be pretty angry that this was at a committee before somebody told me that you were thinking about building on my garage.

"There is something wrong with the way we are doing stuff that is leaving us wide open. There is something not right in the mechanism."

She listed several other sites on the scheme that had descended into confusion - some of which, like Orsett, had to be scrapped. Only last week Thurrock Nub News reported on a botched planning application for a site in South Ockendon where the council conceded it had not done due diligence or thought through the scheme to knock down the Prince of Wales pub properly!

On that issue Mr Andrews later explained a planning application for demolition has been withdrawn because of lack of communication between departments in the council, where officers had raised objections against other officers' plans after the planning application had been submitted. He says a new application for demolition will be forthcoming.

Returning to the Lyndhurst Road garages issue, Mr Andrews said the fault was that since the council had decided to be 'open and transparent' and was bringing the site schemes into the public domain early, there was no set process for how the administration should be handled.

Cllr Worrall said that wasn't really a fair reflection of the situation, it was just that the council wasn't doing its homework!

Cllr Spillman said: "I know the intention is to be transparent but what we are going is worrying people on loads and loads of sites.

"We should discuss this in private before so we have a list without worrying people unnecessarily. We should have the democratic oversight later in the process.

"You should have discussions between the parties beforehand so you have parameters to bring to a meeting, having done the consultation first.

"I do appreciate this process is trying to be as transparent as possible, it's just whether or not we should be transparent in stage one which is just ideas. We can find out in stage two if they are a goers and perhaps we should not be bringing them to committee until stage three when we know whether they are a goer or not.

"I think Lyn has a point!"

After the meeting Cllr Worrall said it was time to review the whole sites list process.

She told Thurrock Nub News: "More and more of the sites on this list have been removed, shelved or put on pause. This whole process of bringing house building sites forward is flawed. It needs to be scrapped and looked at again.

"The Tories have failed to bring forward sensible plans to build one development in the last four years, and now they agree with us that this list is worrying residents.

"Enough is enough. We need an ambitious house building plan so that Thurrock families can have the homes they deserve."