A bar will close down next month after an official found a 42-year-old planning condition that everyone had forgotten about. Jason Hamer, who owns the CFeleven bar in Cardiff, said the "ridiculous" situation has cost five staff their jobs.
The owners of CFeleven, on Cathedral Road, opened an upmarket gin bar six years ago after around 40 years of running as just a bed and breakfast. They obtained permission for an alcohol licence at the time and had become a popular venue.
But the gin bar will now have to shut down at the end of January after a Cardiff council officer reportedly trawled decades of archives and found the B&B was originally approved on the basis that its bar would only be open to "residents of the hotel".
Mr Hamer, who has owned the site for 16 years, told WalesOnline: "As far as we were aware there were no issues with planning. During Covid we had an increase of people drinking in the garden and there were some complaints about the noise. The council's environmental health department did a sound test and we weren't a noise nuisance or anything.
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"Then one of the people in environmental health said he wanted to see all the planning conditions. It was him who fired the gun. He asked the planning department to check the conditions going back decades. They checked the microfiche archives and found a condition from 1980 saying we could sell alcohol but only to hotel guests."
Mr Hamer, 58, was informed of the problem last year and unsuccessfully applied to the council for the condition to be removed. He then spent around £16,000 appealing against the council's decision. The planning inspectorate told him last month that the appeal had failed and that the bar must shut to non-residents within three months.
"We have had to make five people redundant because of it," said Mr Hamer. "One of them lives here and has had to find a new home. There was a statement from the planning inspectorate saying that while they sympathise with people being made redundant, they think three months' notice is more than fair.
"The main reason given was about not disturbing residents because we're in a residential area of Cathedral Road. That's despite this area having the Pontcanna Inn, the Beverley, the Halfway, the Conway, the Robin Hood, some of which are closer to houses than us.
"We had just spent a lot of money converting the whole downstairs and garden, putting in a kitchen and getting a heater umbrella... It's ridiculous. No one even knew about the planning condition. It wouldn't surprise me if a few of the former B&Bs on Cathedral Road have a similar rule."
Mr Hamer does not yet know if the business will remain open in the long-term. He said: "It's an option to keep running it as a B&B but it's also an option to convert to flats or sell it. If you look along Cathedral Road the majority of the B&Bs have been converted to flats and houses — St Hilary Hotel, the Penrhys Hotel, the Church Guest House."
When CFeleven first applied for its alcohol licence in 2017, the Cardiff West MS Mark Drakeford — who has since become First Minister — submitted an objection. He wrote a letter with Cardiff West MP Kevin Brennan arguing that Pontcanna was "already saturated" with alcohol licences and approving one for CFeleven would "inevitably" add to "noise and disturbance".
But the licence was granted by a council committee. One of its members, councillor Jacqueline Parry, said: “Although we sympathise with the concerns of the residents we have not heard evidence to suggest these premises will cause any problems in the area.”
After the historic planning condition was discovered, a representative of the bar wrote to the council: "The service offered at the premises is not a large stand-up volume drinking establishment. Service is by waitress / waiter service only and prices for the drinks are high. For example, a pint of standard lager is £5.30, a small glass of wine starts at £3.50 with a 250ml glass of wine starting at £6.50."
The bar applied for the condition to be removed but received 15 comments from the public — all of which were objections. Norman Stebson wrote: "I oppose this on the grounds that the noise / extra traffic / drunken behaviour / temporary taxi rank / dumping of glasses in nearby gardens, urinating in the back lane have all been witnessed by myself."
Dyfrig Jones added: "The noise coming from this bar is unbelievable — it is jam-packed and it makes it difficult for my children to study and sleep. It is constant on Friday evening from 5pm, Saturday from 2pm and on Sunday also. All year around. Unacceptable."
Dr Edward Fahey questioned the business' claim that the bar was not a "large stand-up volume drinking establishment". He pointed out that the venue advertises for parties of up to 120 people and commented: "In my opinion 120 people in a bar is a large volume premises."
And Fiona Davies wrote: "Customers leave vomit and cigarette butts outside the property on a regular basis and are extremely loud when leaving the premises. The premises are a blight on what is primarily a residential neighbourhood. I do not hear customers leaving Milkwood or Tom Simmonds or Canna Deli being so antisocial late in the night and the outside of those premises are kept clean."
The planning officer rejected the application after finding that removing the planning condition would cause "unacceptable harm". They accepted the business had put some measures in place to lower noise levels, such as screening for the beer garden and reduced weekday opening times, but these did not overcome the "noise and disturbance" concerns, said the report.
Mr Hamer told WalesOnline: "It's not a Wetherspoon pub. We haven't got sport on with people chanting and cheering. I understand you've got your immediate residents but we shut the garden at 9pm as a condition of the licence."
He added that many of the noise complaints came as the coronavirus lockdown was easing. "There was the silence of Covid for four months and then people were allowed out to drink but only in beer gardens. We used ours to full capacity, so it went from no noise at all to 80 or 90 people drinking in our garden. I totally sympathised with residents and we did as much as we could to keep the noise down."
A spokesperson for Cardiff Council said: “CF Eleven is a bed and breakfast business and not a public house. Any business owner or developer must check all regulatory aspects relating to their property, and its use, and whether it has the required consents in place or not, for the use that it is being used for.
“Planning and licensing are completely different functions. They are determined through different processes and under different legislation. Licensing applications were received from this business in February 2017 to sell alcohol at the guest house, with revisions put forwards in August 2018 to try to ease some of the conditions that were imposed originally.
“Despite a significant number of objections from local residents, the results of both these applications were favourable to the business owner. Separate to the licensing matter, a planning condition relating to the original planning permission for the hotel/guesthouse states that the bar and restaurant facilities can only be used by people staying at the establishment.
"Everything that the council has done is in line with all relevant legislation, both in terms of licensing and planning. The decisions to refuse all the retrospective planning applications put forward by the business owner have also been upheld by the Planning Inspector at Welsh Government.”
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