A BLOCKLEY businessman claims inflexible planners are helping to drive rural businesses to the brink.

Garage owner Richard Stuart-Turner says a long-running series of planning disputes with Cotswold District Council have left him totally disheartened. Now he says governments and council s need to be alerted to the problems bureaucracy and legislation are causing rural firms like his own.

"It seems that Cotswold District are a law unto themselves and they are not open to negotiations," said Mr Stuart-Turner, who has run R & W Recovery and Repairs since 1989.

"Small businesses in rural areas cannot stand the pressures we are being put under."

His own problems began in 1991 when he applied twice for planning permission to build a small house next to his Draycott Road business. He was refused and was then told that converting a small barn nearby would probably not be allowed either, but a year later plans to convert the barn were approved and a larger house approved for a site very close to where he wanted his own small house.

He then had to move his business to a new site and applied to build a house next to it, because a contract he has with Gloucestershire Constabulary means he has to live near the business, which is on an industrial site. Cotswold District Council rejected his plans, but he won a planning appeal, which cost him £20,000.

All seemed set fair until the council approved a change of use for nearby business premises. Because he felt the new industrial use would be too intrusive he was forced to ask for permission to move his house. The council agreed, but said he had to connect the new house to the main sewer at a cost of £15,000. Mr Stuart-Turner came up with an alternative sewage scheme, but the council felt this was not acceptable.

Now he says that the cost of the appeal and the sewer connection together mean he can no longer afford to go ahead with his plans and he has abandoned them. He is now trying to find another alternative.

He asked: "Will those people elected (both locally and at a national level) ever wake up to the real plight of rural communities and try to help with their problems?" But Tony Jones, the head of planning at Cotswold District Council, said he believed the council had acted flexibly, even going outside its own policies to allow Mr Stuart-Turner to resite his house on an industrial site. The cost of the sewage connection, he said, was because Mr Stuart-Turner wanted to live on the industrial site and not in any houses nearby.

Of the 1991 plans, he said the barn conversion later approved was for a holiday let and the approved house was on a slightly different site to Mr Stuart-Turner's plan.