Adam Price

Hi I am a Carmarthenshire resident, having problems getting planning to live on the land we bought in 2011, for the welfare of the horses I train. My business will absolutely fold, if they stop me staying here overnight. I’m Welsh my parents are Welsh, there parents are Welsh, I’ve represented wales, 3 times in the dressage ring, and we all know that the ability to better our circumstances in wales is hugely compromised if you’ve never lived anywhere else. There telling me that I need to buy a property, with the facilities already up and running so that I can then run my business, but my council house is only worth 80,000 I have a mortgage, of 35,000, so the short fall, is so massive, that the banks would never loan me the money to buy a farm, and if they did, the chances are that I would not be able to make the payments. If I lived close to London, or anywhere central, the chances are that I could sell my council house, and easily afford to buy a farm. The only way I could better my situation would be to purchase low quality land, then develop that into what I needed, which is what we’ve attempted to do.
In 2011 we bought 17 acres of land running along side the route 47 cycle network, sustran. Seven acres of that land was the old railway sidings directly next door to the mynydd mawr railway heritage centre, the rest was unkempt boggy land that had not been farmed for at least 30 yrs. The 7 acre potion of railway sidings where classed as a brown site just outside of the boundary, of the Cynheidre village. This land had been the site where the colliery had dumped hardcore to fill the shafts of the colliery when it closed. That potion of land contained no grass, and to be honest was an eyesore to the neighbours, and pedestrians walking along the cycle track. In the first 4 yrs, we cleaned and ditched the 10 acre field, so that it could be used for the horses, and levelled the 7 acre field placing a static caravan there for security, and facility’s to make tea and change clothes, and also built sheds, and a ménage for me to exercise the horses, and have some kind of financial return on the land we’d purchased. In 2014, we bought another 23 acres of land running next o us, and alongside the cycle track heading in the direction of felinfoel. When we told people we where buying this land, they laughed at us and said the land would never be of a good enough quality to graze, and definitely would never produce enough grass to bale. They where wrong, as over the last 4 yrs, the land has produced, 100 bales of haylage every year, and the 7 acre brown site, is know only 1 acres brown, the rest we have managed to put back to grass, and to be quite honest looks beautiful, compared to the site prior to the purchase, it’s not just us that think that, all our neighbours, cycle track users are witness to it. Carmarthenshire county council don’t agree, they think we haven’t invested in the land, but they weren’t the ones cleaning back trash from the fields , stone picking, and ploughing well into the night in there spare time. The clients that keep there horses with me for training are all prepared to put in writing that they would not be prepared to keep there horses with me if there was no one here in the night. We are approaching at speed, one of the worst economic crisis I’ve ever lived through, and my council is actively trying to ruin my business, I regardless of the fact that we are supposed to be cutting back on vehicle pollution, my house if 5 miles away, the diesel coming back and fore will cripple me since the rising fuel prices haven’t capped yet. I understand that they don’t want people building randomly, in areas of beauty, or put planning in for huge properties, that they will then sell off for huge financial profits, but we have stated over and over, that we will never want a huge house on the land, all we want is to live in the caravan on the site, or at best have a 1 bedroom wood cabin, I’m happy to have the dwelling attached to the business forever, I’ll put it in writing, that we’ll never want a big house here, we just want to make our business work, as if they stop us living here, we will struggle to keep going, if the business closes, to be honest the chances are we will lose our house, and the land. How is this helping the Welsh people to prosper. I have had huge mental health problems since being bullied in school as a teenager, the horses and my job have kept me alive. I never thought when I left school that at the age of 46 I would feel as alone and anxious as I did when I was bullied in school, but here I am. I can’t sleep I can barely put one foot in front of the other to keep going with the worry of losing my livelihood, the planning officer told me that he’d like to live in a mansion, but we can’t always have what we want, I replied that I haven’t asked for a mansion, I want my business to work I don’t now where to turn there must be somebody who’d be prepared to help me please, my life is quite honestly depending on it. Please help me.