Pin the tail on the planning application donkey…

I know you are all quite old, so you may not remember how to play “pin the tail on the donkey” so let me refresh your memory. You are blindfolded so you can’t see what you are doing, then you are spun around a few times to make you a bit dizzy and then you are given a tail with a thumb tack to “pin the tail on the donkey” which involves accurately locating the arse end of the ass.

I have drawn to the conclusion that planning in this country is basically “pin the tail on the donkey” for grown-ups. Bear with me, I know you think I hit the Blue Nun particularly early today, but let me explain…

When you prepare an application, you are basically blind to what the Planning Officers, Councillors and local residents want. You get snippets of information from the pre-app and if you speak to the locals, they will all give you contrasting advice (the spinning-you-around-and-making-you-dizzy bit).

You then take the tail with the tack (i.e. the planning application) and have to make it stick at the right place so you win and get your planning permission (you can make up your own jokes about where you have to pin the tail in the context of the planning committee).

But on a serious note, it is really worrying that you can draw this comparison with a system that is so incredibly crucial to the UK economy. The Government is making the right noises, but we have yet to see any real action on this. What will happen to Councils who refuse to make those crucial Local Plans? What will happen to Councillors who repeatedly refuse planning permissions without material reasons?

We have yet again seen it in the last week where a site is being refused planning permission despite there being NO statutory objections. There was one tiny holding objection that could have been conditioned. The whole refusal is centred on very subjective objections on the impact on the landscape from NIMBY groups… No, not the statutory bodies of specialists, they are all content with it. It is the objections by Mr Worrylove down the road who is an “expert” after reading the Daily Mail and a quick Google search.  

This particular one also gets better… There is at the same time a very spurious application by the Parish Council for a Conservation Area that will (quite by chance) cover a vast part of the countryside, including the site way outside the built up village. And there I thought that Conservation Areas are supposed to conserve historic settings… silly me!

It is a very serious industry that is apparently a major priority for the government. It provides a very large percentage of the UK GDP and tens of thousands of jobs. This work provides homes, jobs, water, electricity, growth, infrastructure, biodiversity etc for millions of people. We can’t afford it to be ruined by a bunch of asses anymore!

Until next week,

Henry