One of the greatest pleasures in life (hang on Sir, don’t get your hopes up) is spending someone else’s money – ideally on yourself. Hence air miles and all those loyalty schemes.
That’s the fortunate position that members of Planning Committees find themselves in.
Councils have highly paid staff (just kidding guys; I’ll take that back), who have spent three or four years at university learning their craft.
The Councillors are generally shoved on a short ‘familiarisation’ course for a couple of weeks and become instant experts. It’s like putting someone on a First Aid course and expecting them to come out as brain surgeons.
Of course, many councillors make it their business to get to know the system. They understand and respect their officers’ technical opinions and, if they are industrious – and many are – they will sit down and get a scheme carefully explained to them.
This does not mean that the members must kowtow to the officers, but they should at least know why they are disagreeing. And they should be aware of the costs of refusal if they lose at appeal.
Now the Inspectors are getting shirty about this. The other week an Inspector awarded Peel Group almost £500,000 in costs against Bolton Council after they refused a 1000-unit scheme and golf course.
A slightly different scheme had been approved in 2008 so the costs kept on mounting.
In fact, Peel who are not short of a billion or two hadn’t even asked for costs.
The Inspector called the council’s actions ‘unreasonable behaviour’. “The council used vague, generalised or inaccurate assertions about the proposal’s impact and failed to produce evidence to substantiate each reason for refusal on appeal.”
Now the council is scrounging from its reserves and will need to make more savings – it will cost every woman, man and child in Bolton £2 each I reckon. No cost-of-living crisis there.
For a council who has been making cutbacks in all sorts of areas, this is a lot of dosh.
But then spending other people’s money is so much more fun.
Have a good weekend
Tom
by the Planning PR guru 