Pensioners ‘shattered’ by threat of eviction

Elderly residents of the Lakeminster Park development, near Beverley, were “blissfully unaware” when they sold their old homes that they moving into holiday accommodation.

More than 100 pensioners from Leeds, Bradford, Hull, Beverley, Wakefield, Sheffield, Rotherham, Selby, and York now face eviction.

They include sufferers of lung cancer, Parkinson’s disease, arthritis, diabetes, and other crippling ailments who need homes with easy access, and had given up their jobs looking forward to a mortgage-free life away from city estates now overrun with younger people, a public inquiry was told yesterday.

Dave Foulstone, 61, and his wife sold their bungalow in Dodds Close, Sheffield, to buy their £140,000 park home on the site near Beverley.

Mr Foulstone said: “We found out to our dismay we had purchased a holiday home – not a permanent home.

“We were in a complete state of shock. We would be devastated if we had to leave the site and do not have the money to purchase another property.”

Retired civil servant Alan Coates had been “blissfully unaware” anything was wrong when he became one of the first to move onto the park after selling his bungalow in Grove Hill, Beverley

He is one of the guiding lights of an appeal against East Riding Council’s refusal to grant
retrospective planning consent for permanent homes on the
site.

He and his frail wife had been living there more than two years before council bosses wrote to them to say there was a planning problem. He told the inquiry: “I can’t see we are doing much harm.

“We live in a nice community and pay our taxes. I can’t understand the council’s view for us to have to leave.”

The inquiry is expected to last another fortnight.