Letter: GBC Planning ‘Simply Not Good Enough’ Just Blaming Covid

Published on: 18 Oct, 2021
Updated on: 18 Oct, 2021

From David Smith

In response to Planning Backlog Increases As Councillor Says ‘It’s A Mess’

I think there are some wider issues here rather than just the increase in planning applications.

John Redpath suggesting he knows what he is talking about by congratulating the team on how they are handling this increase, to me just shows he doesn’t.

The [Guildford Borough Council] planning department do not appear to have adjusted their processes to mitigate and address these challenges.

Having had three case officers on my own recent application, the team to the extent I can understand it, seems to just reallocate work, stacking up the in-trays of individual caseworkers, leaving them responsible for their own arrears and then re-allocating cases when people like me complain.

I can only speak from my own experience but their caseworkers don’t answer calls, they don’t provide telephone numbers, they don’t acknowledge communications. And the so-called planning enquiries office didn’t up until recently even have a contact number. They promise a 15 day response to email queries but, in my case, they didn’t respond at all.

As a bare minimum, at a time like this, I would have expected communications to be acknowledged routinely, for a simple explanation to be given that there will be a delay, for an indicative timescale for a response. This can be achieved either by auto-replies or by clerical input. This is not difficult and it need not consume caseworker time.

I had also expected a recorded explanatory message on the planning enquiries phone line. And I would have expected a decent explanation and apology on the planning pages of the council’s website, over and above the generic message about Covid.

I can’t stress enough that these seem like the minimum steps they could take to provide some transparency and accountability – and at the same time help themselves by minimising the volume of progress-chasing contacts from applicants like me who simply want to know what is going on.

Instead we read about the delays on The Guildford Dragon NEWS.

I finally received planning on my property over six months after submitting the application (with extensive effort on my part and with ward councillors enlisted). One of the most frustrating thing for me was seeing much newer applications determined a lot quicker than my own (which was not controversial and had no objections).

Perhaps whoever is responsible should speak to the applicants and gauge their feedback on the process – it’s simply not good enough to keep using Covid as an excuse or saying there is a resourcing issue almost a year after it was first identified.

Completely separate to my personal annoyance, the whole process is surely suffocating growth in Guildford especially with commercial applications taking so long to be determined. The application for Ladymead Retail Park for example, which was to allow a new M&S food store was submitted in April 2020 and finally determined in Sepember 2021.

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