Bainbridge Ings: 'Stubborn' businessman fined £100,000 after refusing to remove glamping pods and caravans from Yorkshire beauty spot

Khan, who runs the site through The Lodge Company North Ltd, of which he is director, bought the land in 2017 and turned it into luxury holiday lets with hard standing for static caravans and luxury cabins. He also had planning permission to rent space for touring caravans and motor homes, but only for one specific field.

The permanent structures such as hard standing and the glamping pods, which were too large and of the wrong type, were in contravention of planning restrictions put in place to protect an area of natural beauty from “harmful” developments, York Crown Court heard.

Khan and his holiday-lets company had repeatedly flouted several ensuing enforcement notices issued by the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority demanding that he restore the land to its natural state and remove the offending structures, but he still refused to comply and appealed some of the notices.

Last year, Khan and his company were each charged with five counts of breaching an enforcement notice and ultimately admitted the offences.

Judge Morris deferred sentence to give Khan the chance to come good on his promise to rectify the situation and remove all the structures which were in breach of the notices.

Khan was told he must start complying with the requirements and remove all the offending fixtures and fittings by July 1 or the judge would “throw the book” at him and fine him an “eye-watering amount of money.”

At the adjourned sentence hearing on Friday, December 13, prosecutor Piers Riley-Smith said that although Khan had removed the glamping pods by the requisite date in July, he had defied other requirements from November 1, namely failing to remove hard standing for static caravans and luxury lodges and other fixtures and fittings such as fencing which were described as an “eyesore”. Khan had simply covered the hard standing with topsoil.

“A significant amount of hard standing remains,” added Mr Riley-Smith.

“In fact, more hard standing has been brought onto the site and new pitches been put in the same field.”

Khan had contravened a separate notice and failed to rectify the situation as per the judge’s orders by allowing touring caravans to pitch up on the same field where only tents were allowed.

There had been “partial” compliance with the order to remove static caravans, timber cabins and some of the hard standing, but four guest washroom units “wrapped in black plastic” remained on the site in breach of the notice.

Although Khan had removed most of the 10 glamping pods, but two remained on site.

The “most significant” breach of the judge’s order was Khan’s failure to remove all the touring caravans from one of the fields.

Mr Morris had ordered Khan to remove the tourers by July 1 and he initially complied, but when an enforcement officer visited the holiday park in October, five touring caravans were back on the site. By December 10, there was still one tourer present.

Mr Riley-Smith said although the luxury cabins had been removed by July, the associated hot tubs and hard standing on which they stood remained.

“In fact, (there has been) a very significant amount of (further) unauthorised development in this field,” he added.

He said it appeared that Khan had allowed more tourers onto the site and laid more hard standing “in the hope that we wouldn’t have checked”.

He said the unlawful developments had led to an overall gain of £953,161 for Khan and his company, minus outgoings.

Defence barrister Nick Johnson said that due to Khan’s substantial expenditure on the site, “in reality” the financial gain was not only nil, but had led to a loss in the tens of thousands.

He said that Khan, who had a taxable income of about £100,000, had permission to host touring caravans but only in one field. He had breached the notice by allowing them onto a hilly field where permission didn’t exist.

He said that Khan was a “stubborn, complicated individual” who had endured recent family tragedies and allowed things to “get out of control”.

Khan’s original breach of the first enforcement notice was by erecting the 10 glamping pods, eight of which were too large and of a different design and lay-out to that agreed with the park authorities when they were granted planning permission in 2018.

He appealed the notice, asking for permission to keep the pods as they were, but a planning inspector rejected his bid in January 2020 and said they would have to be removed because they would have a seriously harmful effect on the landscape.

However, by December 2023, all the pods were still being rented out and had generated an income of just under £582,000 over a period of about four years.

There were two further breaches of the original notice in that in one of the fields, Khan only had permission for tents but erected a static caravan, a timber cabin used for staff accommodation and a washroom.

In a separate field on the land off Bainbridge Lane, Khan had permission to host touring caravans between April and the end of October 2019 only, but by June of that year, he had installed four luxury log cabins, fencing and hot tubs for which there was no planning permission. Income from renting the log cabins was £336,413, minus expenses.

Overall yearly profits for Khan and his “overarching company” at Bainbridge Ings between 2020 and 2023 ranged from £116,000 to £436,000, with The Lodge Company North itself posting annual profits of up to £51,000.

Khan, of Templand Lane, Allithwaite, Cumbria, also ran a holiday park in the Lake District through a separate company which was convicted last year of three counts of breaching an enforcement notice by the erection of an “unauthorised residential unit”.

At the adjourned sentence hearing on Friday, Judge Morris said that developments in national parks had to be “strictly controlled” to protect the beauty of the surrounding (landscape)”, and that Khan’s “pig-headed” refusal to comply with the notices and his orders threatened to repel visitors and “despoil” the countryside.

He said Khan had shown an “overwhelming sense of self-entitlement, taking risks, thinking you are going to get away with it”.

He told Khan: “You are an intelligent man but you were too greedy and you were too willing to constantly keeping pushing the boundaries of what was permissible in the hope that someone was going to just give up and look away, to your financial advantage.

“When this case came in for sentence the last time…I decided to give you another chance to see if you really had turned over a new leaf, to see if the remorse was genuine and whether you would really undertake that which you promised to do to rectify what you had done against these planning enforcement notices.

“But, Mr Khan, again you say one thing and you do another, or you try and rectify something, but you don’t do it properly. You give with one hand, and you take with the other.”

He told Khan that the picturesque site was “not yours…to do as you like”.

“You have obfuscated, dodged, cheated, right up to today, and the failure to comply went on for a considerable length of time,” added Mr Morris.

“The park authorities have had to pay thousands of pounds investigating you and getting you to do what you should do when they could be doing other things, and I think any remorse you have is for your situation and not for what you have done.”

In addition to the £75,000 fine, Khan and the Lodge Company North were ordered to pay £41,519 prosecution costs.