Letter: Pre-application Advice for Railway Station Plan Should Be Made Public

Published on: 2 Jul, 2016
Updated on: 2 Jul, 2016

From Gerald Bland

See: Railway Station Plan Rejected and ‘Should be Shunted Into A Siding’

From March 2016 the London Borough of Kensington & Chelsea have been publishing pre-application advice on their website at the same time as the related planning application is submitted.

Why can’t Guildford Borough Council [GBC] resolve to adopt this approach, at least for major applications? We would then immediately see both sides of the planning argument rather than have to wait for the council’s argument to be articulated at the very last minute in the report accompanying the Planning Committee agenda papers.

This prolonged public silence by the planners falls well short of the level of transparency and accountability we are told our councillors expect of their officers.

Until GBC embrace that change there is nothing to prevent either the council or Solum publishing Carol Humphrey’s [former head of planning at GBC] pre-app advice. We might then better understand how we ended up not with a comprehensive station development, but a monolith in a railway siding to which so very many are opposed.