A WYE Valley man says he is being unfairly pursued by county planning enforcers, while turning a blind eye to a larger neighbour.

Phil Johnson has lived with his two cats in a mobile home near Walford in the Wye Valley National Landscape since 2020 and is renovating a former dairy nearby.

But though work on the new home has planning permission, Herefordshire Council issued an enforcement notice last April demanding he vacate the mobile home within six months and remove it.

This is now the subject of a planning appeal – to which the council has submitted that Mr Johnson “has failed to demonstrate there is a need for the caravan to accommodate a residential presence in an unsustainable countryside location”.

Mr Johnson says he is at a loss to explain the council’s objection to his temporary home, given he has moved it out of sight of neighbours and the road.

Meanwhile, he says the noise of extractor fans from a new potato store at the neighbouring Home Farm is stopping him sleeping, leaving him on antidepressants.

An official told him he was living in a farming area and the noise did not constitute a statutory nuisance.

But the planning application designs for the barn don’t appear to show fans, while the council’s planning officer concluded then that it would not impact residential amenity, or “give rise to odour, noise and nuisance”.

“For three years I’ve been saying, ‘why don’t you just apply the rules’,” Mr Johnson said. “But they won’t take on the big boys.”

South Herefordshire MP Jesse Norman previously asked the council why it did not follow through with demanding retrospective permission for the potato store and fans.

A Herefordshire Council spokesperson said: “Our planning enforcement and environmental health teams thoroughly investigate all cases, and action will be taken where breaches are found.

“We do not comment on individual cases as these are confidential.”