Simon Fawthrop: Labour’s planning changes would shift power from councillors to bureaucrats

Cllr Simon Fawthrop is the Deputy Chairman of Bromley Council’s Development Control Committee.

The Labour Government is currently consulting on various planning reforms, in theory to speed up planning applications. Readers of Conservative Home may not be surprised to learn that they are currently consulting on a Two-Tier planning system.

I won’t bore readers with all the details, as there’s a lot of it and any keen anorak can look it up here:- Reform of planning committees: technical consultation – Page 8 of 8 – Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government – Citizen Space

However, what it boils down to is how planning decisions should be removed from democratic control. The paper assumes that democratically elected councillors are not trusted to take decisions on behalf of their communities. For some reason, instead, unelected bureaucrats are trusted to make these decisions.

Interestingly, in my own authority, the London Borough of Bromley, around 96 per cent of decisions are already taken by Council officials. According to this Government, by taking the remainder of these decisions away from councillors and placing them in either Tier A or Tier B they would speed up the whole process for the other 96 per cent as well. You honestly couldn’t make this up. In general terms, councillors deal with the most contentious and finely balanced decisions and it is only right and proper that these get public scrutiny and are not made behind closed doors.

For any campaigner who has ever knocked on a door and then been confronted with a planning decision; the public complaint or perception (not necessarily one I agree with) is that there is some sort of corruption taking place and brown envelopes have exchanged hands. The most obvious way to increase that perception is to place the decision-making in the hands of unelected officials who are sole decision-makers. The advantage of the current system, where applications can be publicly scrutinised, is that, it’s much harder to influence or bribe a committee of nine Councillors (as is the case in Bromley for a planning committee) than it is to influence a single individual behind closed doors with no scrutiny whatsoever.

The concept that democratically elected decision-makers are bad and bureaucrats are good is typical of the current Labour Government. To give an example, a few years ago we had some very poor decisions in my own ward made by the Planning Inspectorate, which were clearly perverse and contrary to local planning policy; these appeal decisions controversially over-ruled the Council’s decisions. Consequently, along with my ward colleagues, we organised to meet the head of the Planning Inspectorate at the House of Commons, through the office of our local MP. We placed these decisions before the head of the planning inspectorate and they confirmed that the decisions were perverse and they should not have been made. So this assumption that bureaucrats are good and democratically elected Councillors are bad is not founded on any basis of fact. This can also be highlighted by the fact that in Bromley, just as many decisions made under delegated authority are lost at appeal as are those made by democratically elected Councillors. So statistically there’s little difference.

At the moment, democratically elected councillors have the ability to call in to committee a planning application which they believe is; finely balanced, in the public interest, or looks like an unelected planner is making a perverse decision. The proposals from Labour would do away with this ability and leave us all at the mercy of the bureaucrats, with no recourse to scrutiny.

If the Government was serious about reducing time scales and getting quicker decision making, they would remove the appeal process for the vast majority of applications, either through a one strike and you’re out (moratorium on new appeals at the same site for 10 years once an appeal has been lost) or through removing low level householder appeals completely and returning to local decision-making as per pre 2008 where the turnover of applications was much quicker when dealt with mainly by the local planning authority. Is anyone surprised that a system that encourages more appeals takes longer, the reverse of the Government’s aim?

That is why everyone, regardless of political party should oppose the draconian Two-Tier Planning measures currently being proposed and I’d urge everyone to respond to the consultation accordingly.