G A Plant and Tool Hire Ltd, based at Unit 1c Darby Close in Cheney Manor, has applied to vary its Goods Vehicle Operator's Licence so it can keep an additional lorry and trailer at its existing site. It also wants permission to keep a second extra lorry and trailer at Units 1 to 3 Brindley Close, a short drive away, also in Cheney Manor.
The application was published as a statutory public notice via the Public Notice Portal, the national system through which these things are announced to a waiting public. Anyone who owns or occupies nearby land and believes their use or enjoyment of it would be affected has 21 days from publication to write to the Traffic Commissioner at Quarry House in Leeds, stating their reasons and sending a copy to the applicant. The Commissioner's office handles matters of this precise scale on a regular basis, somewhere between a national rail inquiry and deciding whose bin goes where on collection day.
It is, on paper, two lorries and two trailers. In practice, Cheney Manor has entered a formal 21 day period of low-grade dread, during which anyone with a strong opinion about reversing beeps is legally entitled to put it in writing to Leeds.
Residents near Darby Close and Brindley Close have reportedly begun watching the industrial estate with the quiet vigilance normally reserved for speed camera vans. One unit occupier was overheard asking whether the new trailer would be parked facing the road or facing away, a question with no legal bearing whatsoever but considerable emotional weight.
Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said she had followed the matter with some interest despite living nowhere near Cheney Manor. 'I'm not one to gossip,' she said, 'but I hear the fellow at Brindley Close already parks that badly with the trailers he's got. Ron used to reverse a coal lorry into a space you couldn't post a letter through. Nobody wrote to Leeds about that.'
Gary Tench, Area Manager at Tench Paper Solutions in Westlea, said the 21 day objection window had given him a new way of describing the approvals process for his own expenses claims. 'Pending representations from any affected party, that's basically what Julie tells me every time I submit a receipt for printer toner,' he said. 'Three weeks of silence, then it just goes through anyway. I've started calling my desk an operating centre. Nobody's objected to that either, but I live in hope.'
A spokesperson for the Traffic Commissioner's office said it was unable to comment on individual applications while they remained live, which is itself a sentence that has never stopped anyone feeling strongly about a trailer.
By the time the 21 days are up, Cheney Manor will know whether it has gained two goods vehicles and two trailers, or whether someone's enjoyment of a nearby bit of tarmac has carried the day in Leeds. The trailers themselves, when reached for comment, remained exactly where they were.