Councillor, stop gambling with planning!
I know I bang on about this ad infinitum and I will keep on like a broken record until Councillors start listening! So, indulge me again as I deliver a sermon on the evils and incompetence of Planning Committees rejecting planning applications on flimsy grounds. Councillor, before you get your “Rejected” rubber stamp out, STOP. THINK.
The new MP for Banbury, Sean Woodcock has slammed Cherwell District Council for racking up £499,000 (yes, half a million!) in costs on lost appeals. I quote for you from the report presented to Councillors: “The spend to date on appeals is £0.499m against an original budget provision of £0.100m. This has meant it has been necessary to call upon the appeals reserve to mitigate the overspend on spend to date. Any further cost incurred in defending appeals will require alternative sources of funding.”
The report then continues to list four new appeals, 27 appeals already in the system a public enquiry, one pending an outcome etc. etc. So you can see that £500k is very quickly going to go up and up and up.
That, dear Councillors is money that you should be spending on more pressing needs. Next time you don’t have money to fix pot holes or street lights or a play area or street trees or your council leisure centre, remember you gambled it away on pointless appeals.
There is an easy fix. If you look back Medway in Kent or Basingstoke in Hampshire there used to be ridiculously large losses too but they changed. In both those cases, the authorities changed colour and the new Leaders, Paul Harvey in Basingstoke and Vince Maple in Medway are very engaged and actually talk to developers to help shape developments. And it is a huge credit to them that not only are they saving money for their councils, they are also generating it with the inward investment that comes with development. And yes, both of them start conversations about infrastructure.
Of course, Cherwell is not the only Council… I won’t bore you with the details but there is a Planning Committee in one of the Home Counties, let’s call them Spent-Trees Borough Council. Now they have recently turned down a whole plethora of applications on the flimsiest of reasons. These were all with officers’ recommendation for approval and are now all on their way to appeals.
Spare a thought for the poor officer who had written the report recommending approval that now needs to go and stand in front of our friendly inspector and say: “Sorry guv, I (with my degree in town planning) got this wrong and Councillor Bloggs who did ½ hour of training got it right with these flimsy reasons. And then we wonder why Councils can’t find planning officers to work for them…
But then we did also have a huge success last week with a solar farm getting permission. So at least that cheered me up!
Until next week,
Henry