Sleeping with the (political) enemy

As the dust settled on the last Council Annual General Meetings last week we saw a very graphic display of how political Parties, often with very different ideologies, got into bed with one another to form all sorts of weird and whacky coalitions to form administrations.

Almost half (yes, you read that right, almost one out of every two) of all the Councils in England are now under “No Overall Control”. This means that no one single political Party had the majority of seats to form an administration. To form an administration, someone needs to be voted in as Leader of the Council to then put together a Cabinet and appoint members to the Planning Committee and a Chair of the Planning Committee.

Sometimes, to get to that number to have a majority in the Council chamber, strange deals are done. Now, admittedly, these deals first and foremost is focussed on appointing a Leader and by extension, that coalition who supported an individual to become the Leader will then also pass the Council annual budget. If they can’t pass a budget, they can’t run the Council.

There have been some spectacular examples of this for example in Enfield the Greens backed the Tories. Now on the face of it, the Greens and the Tories doesn’t have much in common however, in Enfield both Parties campaigned against the Labour Government’s plans for a New Town on the Green Belt. So, they had sufficient ground to back the Tories over Labour and replace the Labour administration with a Tory one.

In Basildon the Tories and ReformUK fought like cat and dog over the same voters and after the election they got in bed to form an administration and oust Labour from office. The new administration immediately pulled the plug on the Basildon Arena and is talking about scrapping the Local Plan.

I can give you many other examples of where and how this happened. For almost half the Country in fact!

The impact of these No Overall Control Councils will be affecting decision making especially in Planning for the next few years. You will have to understand the composition of your Planning Committee very clearly. Your arguments will have to be very carefully crafted to ensure that you get a majority of the votes… Not unlike our poor friend the Council Leader that had to find common ground to get the votes to become Leader and pass a budget, you too will have to build a coalition of support for your application to ensure that you get a local consent.

This can be very daunting, but you are in luck! Our team represents all five the major Parties and we understand the Politics of planning like no-one else. Don’t risk the Planning Committee voting you down, talk to us with our 99.1% success rate. (Also, we are cheaper than the Barristers and we cut the delay that appeals bring).

Until next week,

Henry