Recently there has been a complaint about my residence on the ELF trust land. Justification is a complex issue but authority is another.
Clearly such residence has layers of authority, the proprietors being the least of the concerns for me.

It may be useful to define residence, often referred to as 'where a person lives'
First I would like to dismiss the notion of 'where someone lives' as being an absolute and within the body whereas residence is the location of the body in relative terms.

Residence

For most residence is close the the planetary surface and can be reference by latitude i.e. distance relative to the south and north poles and longitude, distance from an arbitrary but accepted path between the poles set as zero, which happens to pass through the town of Greenwich, UK.

Many people spend most of their time somewhat above the surface, excluding footwear, in a building. It is too this structure that planning regulations are tuned.
Residence on land without a building is also accounted for and in a roundabout way so is a mobile home and public transport.

There are, apart from birth and authority beginning with parents, reasons a person may reside in one place or another. The two commonly are rest and work. As these 'occupations' have an effect on the environment they are monitored. For example the planning legislation allows the change of use of land for up to 28 days per year, without it coming under the perusal of development planning legislation.

So the criteria is, does rest or work have a detrimental impact upon the environment that it requires control. Rest also includes entertainment for the consumer. Resting in a field reading a book may be seen as relatively benign whereas flying kite may not.

• Historically the local district government, Caradon, oversaw the national regulations as laid down by the Planning Act 1990 (The Act)
• Then Cornwall took over from the district council
• More recently there is the Parish Local Development body

Justification

The two main criteria for planning are
a) Is the residence a single use or ancillary to an existing lawful use of land or
b) Does the residence cause any long term damage to the location.

If there is any concern then the Act defines any change of use as development and there are then regulations to implement authority granted by the The Act

The guidance to The Act clarifies that it is not enough that residence or any other use that is classed as development needs any action to stop it, i.e having regard to b) above

Complainants

Neighbours can be concerned, devious or malicious and complain about a change in use to residential In the case of a complaint the local authority is pretty much obliged to look at the issue or subsequently be charge of not fulfilling their function adequately.

It is difficult to assess under which heading a complaint may be, . . .

Mischievous and Devious
Given the council has limited resources complains by one person can be used to avoid them having to be queried and further hide behind the furore created.

Malicious
Some people don't like other people's lifestyle, religion, colour, sexual orientation etc. and will complain hoping the complainee will move away or have some burden put upon them. This has happen a few times here and maybe starting up again ~ I do wonder whom it may be :)