Lezayre Boundary

20 June 2024

We are delighted that the application to extend the boundary of Ramsey Town has not been recommended for approval and that the Department of Infrastructure has accepted the recommendation to reject the application and will not be taking the request to Tynwald.

Corlett Bolton acted as advocates for Lezayre Parish Commissioners (“LPC”), representing them at the Public Inquiry held following the application by Ramsey Town Commissioners (“RTC”) which sought to extend the current Ramsey Town boundary by removing large areas of Lezayre (including Glen Auldyn) and Garff and including them within Ramsey’s proposed new boundary (the “Application”).

LPC strongly objected to the Application (as did Garff Commissioners and 272 of the 334 persons who responded to the consultation.) On behalf of LPC we submitted that there is not insufficient acreage within the existing Ramsey boundary to satisfy a defined housing need, especially when Ramsey has a high property vacancy rate of 16% as identified in the 2021 census. We also submitted that the Application was premature given the status of the Draft Area Plan for the North and West and that there were no reasonable arguments why RTC wanted to futureproof Ramsey for 30 years when planning policy generally has a plan of 10 years. We further argued that RTC had failed to satisfy the six criteria and that the large areas of primarily rural countryside sought simply could not be considered as an overspill or outgrowth of Ramsey.

We are thrilled that the Public Inquiry agreed with our submissions, and has held that Ramsey does have sufficient land within its current boundary to accommodate its predicted growth to 2031 and “that the Application was far larger than RTC would ever have required for an outgrowth even on the most optimistic estimates of population growth”.