The former Liverpool Arms pub can be converted into a house after all.

Following a planning application, an appeal and a court judgment, the future of the pub is finally looking clearer.

It was in August 2020 when the application was made to convert the former pub on Main Road, Baldrine, into a house, following the pub’s closure in 2017.

A previous application to convert it into a house ahead of sale by Heron and Brearley was quashed by the planning committee in 2019, ahead of the new application being submitted.

Following the August 2020 application, the planning committee rejected the plans in October 2020, with H&B appealing against this just two days later. 

The appeal was considered by former environment minister Geoffrey Boot, however he sided with the committee and refused the appeal.

But in May this year First Deemster Andrew Corlett found that Mr Boot had breach the rules of procedural fairness and ordered it back to the Department of the Environment, Food and Agriculture to consider. 

At the time, H&B claimed that Mr Boot had taken advice from an external planning adviser, Kevin Gillespie, and then DEFA chief executive Richard Lole. 

The decision said that the brewery claimed that ‘Mr Gillespie expressed an opinion which was unfavourable to H&B’s appeal and about which H&B ought to have been but were not given the opportunity to comment’.

Deemster Corlett ultimately agreed and ruled that the decision not to grant the appeal was ‘unsustainable and unreasonable’.

Following a review by the department, that fresh appeal has been granted, meaning the pub, which has become an eyesore on the road from Onchan to Laxey, can be converted into housing.

That does come with a caveat, as shared by Garff Commissioners, that: ‘The residential development hereby approved shall be limited to the use of the existing building as a single dwelling house.’

In simple terms, it can’t be converted into flats or other such buildings of multiple occupancy.