Please have a read of this before I send and let me know your thoughts….


Afternoon David,

Hope you’re well.

Just a quick update.

As you know the site has always had this massive grey cloud hanging over it with respect to the GCN.

I have always been rather underwhelmed with Wild Frontier and always felt they were working against us, rather then for us. As such we recently employed the services of TORC Ecology in order to help construct an application to Natural England for the district level license route for the GCN. TORC ecology were happy to pick up the pieces, and present a case to Natural England in the hope of achieving a reduced fee for this DLL. They had warned of the complexities around how Natural England calculate the DLL figure, and that he had previously seen quotes for the licence ranging from £10,000 - £80,000!

However, I have just received the licence quote back from Natural England (attached as below for transparency) for £9089.52 + VAT + fee + admin charges. (Total of circa £13,000) This means that the one acre area of land that we wish to purchase from you can be built upon immediately following the payment of this licence.

As you know, ever since we started speaking a few years back we always felt this cost should sit with yourself, as ultimately the land cannot be used for anything other than its current state until the GCN issue is addressed.

I have paid tens of thousands of pounds myself in previous Wild Frontier reports, Natural England fees (for the quotation) and now TORC ecology assisting with this package. All with the aim of reducing this fee for yourself.

Away from the cost, it was myself who also found the two leaks on the site (and assisted with the process of getting Anglian Water to fix), which will undoubtedly help your future plans for the site.

Taking all this into account – and to be fair to you, I propose the following;

I will continue to pursue the DLL route (and cover ALL fees there forward with regards to this) but the transaction for the land should be £185,000 + VAT.
I suspect you’ll be relatively happy with this, knowing that we are one step closer to exchange for the land, and that this time consuming and costly issue of the GCN isn’t costing the silly money of £50,000+ I was concerned about.

We are now pushing hard daily with all detailed drawings. We suspect that the tender process will start by April/May, with a view to a contractor being on site by June/July.

With those timescales involved, and trusting you are ok with the above, I propose that you start the process of instructing your solicitor once more with a view to exchange shortly before we start building in the summer.

Let me know your thoughts. More than happy to chat on the phone if youd rather.

Kind Regards,

Andrew Prior.

01553 773677
164 St Peters Road, West Lynn, Kings Lynn. PE34 3JF.
www.priorsofwestlynn.co.uk