Leave it to the professionals
The Planning and Infrastructure Bill was recently published and one of its objectives jumped off the page for me:
“In exercising local democratic oversight, it is vital that planning committees operate as effectively as possible. The Bill will ensure that they play their proper role in scrutinising development without obstructing it, whilst maximising the use of experienced professional planners.”
Having spent nearly two decades as a planning consultant – before which I was a planner in a local planning authority which I’ll come onto – I have lost count of the amount of planning committee meetings I have attended across the country. What I’ve also lost count of is the number of times I’ve had to try and look neutral as inside I’m thinking, “What on earth are you going on about?” when the committee members start to speak.
This is not just in relation to the applications I’m there to speak about, this is in regard to numerous applications I have absolutely no investment in but have had to sit through whilst waiting for my time to shine. I also tend to hang around and sit through a few more applications being discussed after I’ve done my bit following an incident early on in my private sector career when I was followed to my car by an objector and repeatedly called a “comedian”. Not entirely sure he meant it as a compliment.
Planning committees can play a vital role in allowing appropriate development, but to be blunt, some committee members are simply not up to the job. Many are, but some are not – so the Government is 100% correct to focus on this issue – because if any committee members are not fit for purpose, then the whole planning committee is not fit for purpose.
I could write a thesis on the mind-blowing things I’ve heard from members at planning committee meetings, but a particular stand out was at a planning committee meeting where a residential scheme on an allocated site was being debated and one of the committee members said, “Do we REALLY need all these houses?” Well, it’s a site allocated for housing in YOUR local plan and you don’t have a 5 year housing supply so, you do, aye.
A barrister on a webinar I was watching just the other day was recalling a time she was training committee members at a local planning authority and when she was on the topic of making unlawful decisions, a member raised his hand and asked, “But what if I want to make an unlawful decision?”. Not sure where you go from there.
The bit about “maximising the use of experienced planners” in the objective is very interesting because, trust me, the frustration does not just lie with private sector planners such as myself. On numerous occasions when I was a planner in a local planning authority, I would work tirelessly all week on a report for committee recommending an application, one which was fully compliant with planning policy, for approval, only to get to my desk in the morning to find out that the planning committee had refused it for no other reason than to curry favour with the local objectors.
In this situation, an appeal is submitted to the Planning Inspectorate which has to be dealt with by the planning officer – the same one who recommended it for approval - who also has to focus on the appeal rather than the planning applications they are already struggling to find time to deal with, and it all ends in an appeal allowed and a costs award against the LPA. This is what the general public doesn’t see. That’s taxpayers’ time and money going to waste on something completely avoidable and unnecessary. This was a scenario I was all too familiar with as a planning officer when the workload was tough, yet it’s ten times as tough now so the stress it puts planning officers under must be off the chart.
I’ve also witnessed a Director of Planning stop proceedings in the middle of members discussing the merits of a case, when he saw the way it was going, and make it quite clear that if the committee refused the application against the officer’s recommendation, he would go public and state that he had no confidence in his committee members – then they went ahead and refused it anyway.
I fully appreciate that we live in a democracy and I’m certainly not advocating getting rid of planning committees – and neither is the Government – but they really have to do better if we are going to make any kind of progress.
Will the Planning and Infrastructure Bill be effective? Only time will tell, but there is mounting evidence that the Government is being advised by planning practitioners who have first-hand experience of what is holding back sustainable development in this country, and that can only be a good thing.
