Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:New Low Reached By Dodgy Developers? | |
Posted by: | Adam Beamish | |
Date/Time: | 13/10/15 16:34:00 |
Paul, Every Council encourages developers to go down the pre-application advice route, and in my personal view often the quality of the advice received does not reflect the substantial fee charged for that advice. Indeed on many occasions myself/my clients have decided not to go down the pre-application advice route due to the costs and time delays involved. As a planning consultant, I see a pre-application advice meeting as an opportunity to informally gauge the strength of Officer feeling about what I regard as the key issues, and to enable Officers to highlight any other issues that we might not have considered. Increasingly also the pre-app advice route has become a way of obtaining written clarification from Officers as to precisely what the Council will expect the application to comprise in order for it to be validated, which although it sounds obvious is ever increasingly complicated due to the vast plethora of supporting reports that Councils now insist on as part of planning applications, and such clarification can avoid subsequent validation delays. There are times I have finished pre-application meetings absolutely frustrated at the lack of useful dialogue, with Officers contributing little more than listing their relevant planning policies, which any decent planning consultant will already be fully aware of and will have ensured the clients have given some regard to when drafting up the proposals. Consequently many of my pre-application submissions are now rather lengthy as they go through the whole policy background upfront, to ensure that I can have a more productive dialogue with Officers. I have never come out of a pre-app meeting feeling that any kind of decision has been made. I've come out of pre-app meetings with a feeling that (for example) "if we ensure the application is robust in terms of marketing evidence I think we stand a good chance of getting permission" and I've also come out of pre-apps thinking "well, either we completely change the scheme or we're going to end up getting a refusal and potentially going to appeal". As I repeatedly say, it is very rare for any planning application to completely fully comply with the relevant development plan and all other material planning considerations. More often than not it is all about a balancing act requiring the positives of a proposal to be weighted against its shortcomings. Of course nowadays there is also far more emphasis upon community involvement at pre-application stage in terms of public consultations and such like, and it does rather amuse me when I compare the situation now to schemes 30 years ago when there was no such community involvement whatsoever and applications merely comprise a few drawings and a covering letter. Most of the time clients/developers request that pre-app meetings/advice is confidential until submission because the material can be commercially sensitive, e.g. if they're looking at purchasing a site they don't want to increase its profile for a rival to come along with a different scheme or to make an higher offer. I am always professionally and personally shocked at how 'easily' people use the word corruption without any actual basis to make such a serious allegation. In my many years of experience on both sides of the fence I've never witnessed any attempt at corruption, and in the same way that the public sometimes perceive the relationship between Councillors, officers and developers is 'dodgy', I could say just the same about the perception of the relationship between Councillors, officers and the general public - e.g. walking in a room minutes prior to a Planning Committee (not Hounslow) and the Chair of the Committee having a very cosy chat with the main objectors, and duly voting for refusal, and whilst I don't believe there was anything untoward going on, it was hard not to perceive otherwise. Just the title of this thread makes me uncomfortable as it shows how easily the public use such language, yet if a consultant or developer used such language to describe the public then there would be uproar. What do you honestly think goes on at pre-application advice meetings ? - do you really think developers or their consultants offer some kind of bribe or incentive to officers, and/or do you think officers ask for such in return for an application getting an easy ride ? As John alludes to, most professional consultants and officers are members of their respective professional bodies, e.g the RTPI, RIBA etc. Is an Officer or a professional consultant going to risk being removed from their professional body, with all the associated harm that would cause to their career, for the sake of a small bribe or such like ?. I've been interviewed as part of well documented local Ombudsman investigations relating to the conduct of what used to be the Planning Area Committees, and even when such investigations related purely to the conduct of Members, it still isn't a particularly pleasant experience to be interviewed by an investigator or even associated in any way with such investigations. |