We are all terribly glad of the National Scheme of Delegation that has taken the power away from NIMBY Councillors to call applications to the planning committee and then torpedo them… it has however, freed up a lot of time for Councillors to do other things… like scrutinise the Local Plan process…
I know from experience, I sat on a Planning Committee for years and I recently counted that of the just over 700 applications I helped to determine, under the new rules, just shy of 200 would have come to the Planning Committee. Of the 73 Planning Committee meetings I attended, only 29 would have taken place.
All those three and four hours in the meeting and the hours spent reading the papers and the hours spent going to site visits is time I will never have back. (Btw, you don’t get extra money for sitting on the Planning Committee, only for Chairing it). I didn’t calculate the time I spent on these tasks, as I would probably find it far too depressing.
But let me share with you what I have observed over the past few weeks…
The Government has laid down the law and Councils are now supposed to make Local Plans with some considerable haste (they were given 30 months about 12 months ago) and we all know that there is a plethora of Local Plans being made currently up-and-down the country.
Now, any NIMBY Councillor will now come up with a plan so cunning, you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel. Imagine, if you like, just for a moment, that I am a NIMBY Councillor who got elected on a pledge to stop all development and you (imagine for a second are a NIMBY too) voted for me. I want to make sure you vote for me next time and you expect me (and quite rightly) hold me to account on my NIMBY promises. But… I no longer have the power to call the applications in to the committee where I can come and waffle and you can come and wave your pitch-fork (I demonstrated why your vote was a good choice).
I will tell you what I would do now… I would get in there early and attack you at the Local Plan making stage. I would run a campaign the moment I find out (and no, you can’t hide your site - the call for land is a public document published by the Council) to have your site chucked out of the draft Local Plan.
Fiction? Sadly not! I have seen this happen with sites that had Reg18 draft allocations that get dumped at Reg19… That’s if the site made it to Reg18 in the first place. If I did my NIMBY job well, you won’t even get past the call for sites.
How do you navigate this? How do you get your site allocated? Well, I think you had better call me for a chat… I can’t tell you, the real NIMBYs read my articles!
Until next week,
Henry