Council grants retrospective permission to car wash that had already granted itself permission

"The committee's report concluded that, after fifteen years of established use, enforcement action was unlikely to succeed, chiefly because the car wash had already won."

Swindon Borough Council's planning committee has voted to allow a hand car wash in Haydon Wick to keep operating, despite it having run for more than two years without planning permission. Cross Street Garage, on Thames Avenue, has sold and serviced cars and acted as an MOT centre since at least 2009, on a site that was a petrol station until about 1997. The car wash itself began operating in July 2024, without permission, under canopies the garage had also not been given permission to put up.

The application, heard on Tuesday 13 October, aimed to regularise the lot and had already been deferred once in April pending a drainage strategy, which the council's drainage officer has now accepted, provided washing stays under the canopies and drains to the foul sewer. Three neighbours objected, citing parking, traffic, noise and chemical smells. Councillor Stanka Wilson, who called the application in, said a commercial feature on the site's edge eroded the residential character of the street, and noted the history of unauthorised use with some unease. Highways and Environmental Health raised no objections, and the committee granted permission subject to restricted hours and the canopy rule, closing an enforcement case that had been open since June 2024.

The committee's report concluded that, after fifteen years of established use, enforcement action was unlikely to succeed, chiefly because the car wash had already won. It is understood this sets a precedent whereby sufficiently prolonged defiance of a rule eventually becomes the rule.

Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said she had heard about it from a friend in Haydon Wick who can smell the car wash from her washing line. 'I'm not one to gossip,' she said, 'but apparently they've been at it two years without so much as a by your leave, and the council's only gone and said fair enough. In my day you asked the council first, waited six months for a letter, then did it anyway. At least we kept the order of operations.'

Gary Tench, Area Manager at Tench Paper Solutions in Westlea, said the decision had given him a new way of describing his own use of the Westlea stationery cupboard as an unauthorised rehearsal space for his band, The Lanyards. 'Operating without clearance since March, no recorded complaints from Julie, she's very understanding,' he said. 'Fifteen years of use and it becomes lawful, that's basically HR's policy on my filing system.'

A council spokesperson said each planning application is assessed on its own merits, which residents nearby took to mean that persistence is, in fact, a merit. Questions have already been raised locally about whether a nearby resident's long standing habit of parking half on the pavement might now also qualify for retrospective blessing, on the grounds that nobody has stopped him since 2011.

Cross Street Garage Ltd declined to comment, which under the new arrangement is understood to count as full and binding consent.