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Liverpool FC reached a milestone in history today when the Reds were granted permission to extend their Anfield stadium.

They will be allowed to add an extra 13,000 seats to the Main and Anfield Road stands, taking capacity up to just under 60,000.

The new structures will tower above the surrounding area, rising to up to 45 metres in places.

But those living in the shadow of the club - and those who have had to quit the area because of years of dereliction and decay - spoke at length at the town hall planning meeting about their misery over the years, waiting for Liverpool FC to make up its mind whether it was staying where it was or moving to Stanley Park.

Planning committee chairman Cllr John Macintosh, who recommended the bid be approved, said: “We’ve had the history and I don’t want to go back over those days, I could put forward my own views on what happened and things that went wrong.

“We are at this planning stage now and we have to move forward and carry on.”

Watch: Marc Waddington gives his reaction to the meeting and decision

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In the morning, the committee visited the site, bused into the locked stadium before taking around the ground. However, a planned walkabout of the surrounding streets -either demolished or waiting for the wrecking ball - was scrapped at the last minute.

At the town hall, the LFC delegation was small, with only a handful of agents including architects, traffic consultants and PR men among its number.

They were at pains to stress that the club was keen to work in harmony with the remaining Anfield residents, architect Peter Swift telling the committee: “This is as much about grounding the stadium in the community as it is making it work on match days.”

But one of the main sticking points with members of the committee questioning the applicants was traffic. Despite around 13,000 more seats being added to the stadium, there is no plan to introduce new bus services into the area on match days, and Liberal committee member Cllr Steve Radford pointed to a report which stated around 68% of people currently coming to games did so by car.

Transport consultant Dave Drury conceded there had been “an alarming number of people travelling to games by taxi rather than by bus”, but said the club was working with the transport authorities to try to make sure there was the least impact on the community by traffic.

Despite a last minute attempt by Cllr Radford to defer a decision until the committee had more information about traffic issues, the panel of nine councillors approved chairman Cllr Macintosh’s motion permission be given.

While there was little in the way of celebration on the part of the club delegation, club managing director Ian Ayre later released a statement saying: “We’ve received very positive support for our proposals during a public consultation exercise earlier this year and whilst we are delighted about the progress made today, there are still some steps that we need to navigate through in order to give us the certainty that we need to proceed with our expansion plans.”

Mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson also recognised the “milestone” which would help towards the council’s £260m plans to regenerate the whole area.

Work will begin on the Main stand later this year and should be finished by 2016.

The planning meeting saw opponents of the club’s plans come face to face with those they felt had ruined their community over the last 15 years.

Emotions ran high as objectors relayed their experiences of seeing the area degraded by dereliction ever since the initial ill fated new stadium plan was hatched in the late 1990s.

And they hit out at claims that the area had fallen on hard times because of low housing demand and abandonment, with resident Mike Butler telling the committee: “The applicants themselves are responsible for stage managed decline of the area. Houses were not available, they were boarded up and left.

“The applicant knows this is a lie, the council knows it’s a lie, and the residents know it’s a lie.”

He accused the club of treating Anfield like its own private business estate and not a residential area.

Bill McGarry, the chairman on the Anfield Neighbourhood Forum, told the committee the people of Anfield needed compensation for the community from those whose “neglect and ruthlessness” has “engineered decline”.

He added: “for the most part of the last 30 years the club maintained a close relationship with businesses and many local people ... but it has (since) ridden roughshod over the community and to some extent, over the council.”

While the club had talked about working with the community, objectors were adamant there should be compensation for the losses people who lived or had lived in the shadow of the club had suffered.

Chairman Cllr Macintosh insisted a condition was included on the permission that residents would be part of the working group that monitored how progress developed over the next 20 months while the stadium works took place. They had not been included as one of the main stakeholders.