Letter: We Are Stuck With a Fallible Planning System

Published on: 29 Oct, 2019
Updated on: 29 Oct, 2019

From George Potter

Lib Dem borough councillor for Burpham

In response to: Dragon Says: Tory Government Also Seems Ready to Sacrifice Guildford to Developers’ Profit

More than anything else, this exposes the lack of democracy that lies behind so much dissatisfaction in our country.

Here we have an obvious mistake, a development that in principle would be fine but which in detail and scale is completely wrong. Something which one would think could be easily fixed.

But who can do anything about it? We councillors clearly can’t: we were overruled by the planning inspector. Our MP? She can’t either.

The Secretary of State then? Well, perhaps he could do something in theory but in practice it would be inappropriate and probably impossible to call in and review every stupid planning decision in the country.

Instead, we have a decision made under a system with no actual democratic accountability where all the real power is left in the hands of unelected officials. Those officials may be well-intentioned and experienced but they can’t possibly be infallible.

So we’re left with a system with the potential to make mistakes which can harm an area for decades but where, in practice, there is no one with the power to correct those mistakes.

And we’re stuck with such a situation because, although it causes problems periodically in individual areas, it never causes enough problems on a national level for the government to every consider fundamentally changing it.

For that matter, even if we had a government which was willing to try to change it, what’s the betting that the disruption it would cause, and the push-back from officialdom, would soon dissuade them from change?

This is why it amazes me that people accuse the EU of being undemocratic or of being the source of our ills.

If you’re looking for a lack of democracy then we should start much closer to home at our centralised system that places power in the hands of that bureaucratic officialdom rather than in the hands of local communities where it rightfully belongs.

Responses to Letter: We Are Stuck With a Fallible Planning System

Julian Cranwell Reply

October 30, 2019 at 7:52 am

It seems to me that Guildford is stuck with a fallible leadership, which supports a disastrous Local Plan, which will trash the countryside, and cause a ruinous increase in pollution.

We are also stuck with a failing planning department, which appears fully on the side of greedy developers.

Time to “drain the swamp”.
John Perkins Reply

October 30, 2019 at 9:42 am

Cllr George Potter is right to say that the planning system is undemocratic and also right to say that it’s currently the Tories who are pushing it in a profoundly undemocratic way. However, I doubt that comparing that lack of democracy with the EU is helpful to that cause. It is, though, extraordinary how little harm European planners do to their towns and cities compared with those in this country.

As a council member, Mr Potter must be measured in any criticism of planning officers, but ordinary taxpayers need not be so constrained.

Planning officials inspired by Le Corbusier have been fouling the urban centres of this country since the Second World War. For a while, around the 1980s, it looked as though things had changed and many of their worst excesses were destroyed, but now they’re back and seemingly out for revenge.

Their inferiority is perfectly illustrated in the way they add so many letters after their names, as if passing exams and belonging to trade bodies somehow makes them better people.

In the 80s I was forced sometimes to use Paternoster Square in London. It’s brutalist, soviet-style architecture and terrible wind meant that it was devoid of humanity in any sense of the word. Just like its planners, and in marked contrast to St Paul’s next door. Nobody liked it and it was pulled down after only 35 years or so. As far as I know, no planners were harmed in the redevelopment.