| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Facts | |
| Posted by: | Phil Andrews | |
| Date/Time: | 12/06/11 22:33:00 |
| Adam Like you I can't recall ever having encountered partiality towards or against any political party on the part of council planning officers. Some have their own views and indeed in some cases allegiances, but that is their right and so long as they do not bring them to work it is not an issue. That is not what lies at the root of the issue we had with the department. The problem that arose with the community councillors was that we represented an "ideology", if it can be so described, that sought to create opportunities for greater community involvement in local affairs, including planning matters. This inevitably created the potential for conflict with a department which, in our experience, only involved the public in the process at all when it was absolutely obliged to and even then clearly under extreme protest. The belief that members of the public were untrained and should thus leave planning to those whose field of professional expertise it was clearly informed the department's dealings with said public, which it seemed to consider a nuisance. When the department was restructured (and members of the ICG freely participated in the restructuring process quite oblivious as to what we were letting ourselves in for) this situation was exacerbated by the attitude of certain key personnel who, with our once enthusiastic support, had been elevated to key positions. So in other words what we are talking about is not bias on the part of officers in a party political sense, but a natural defensiveness in the face of a group of councillors with a fundamentally different outlook to that which informed their own corporate view of how the chain of command should operate. The reason this developed and the cause of the relationship deteriorating to the point of breakdown was that, although the community councillors were ostensibly "in power", it was clear to the corporate management that we did not have the backing of our coalition partners. This enabled the corporate management to exploit the situation, to pitch partner against partner, and to take advantage of the ensuing confusion in a way that ensured that any "ideological" influence over the way that we dealt with the public (not in the decisions we took, which we all understood and accepted were dictated by planning law) was stunted as we spent all of our time fighting all comers rather than achieving positive change. To give an example of the attitude to which I refer, an attempt was made to have an Isleworth residents' leader, a very high-profile spokesperson for a civic group with a membership in the thousands, designated a "vexatious complainant" so that all of her correspondence on behalf of her residents could be officially ignored. Only when the ICG threatened to invoke the nuclear option did our partners quietly impress upon the chief officer that he had overstepped the mark (ironically the lady in question was/is a member of the Conservative Party, but it was the ICG's intervention on her behalf that forced the issue). So you will see it was not a question of political preference, so much as one of bureaucratic self-interest. As far as we are concerned it is still unfinished business. |