Sarah,I wish that I could reply in as much detail as you've gone into, I really do, because I feel it deserves the courtesy of a thorough reply.Yes, when I worked in the public sector managing planning enforcement teams it was common for residents to ring up requesting the Council's assistance in dealing with matters that were nothing to do with either planning legislation or other statutory legislation enforceable by local authorities - such as boundary/trespass disputes. The whole planning process is extremely complicated, you may recently have seen the programme 'The Planners Are Coming' on TV, and personally I absolutely hated the programme and spent most of my time in disbelief at both the editing and the behaviour/conduct of some of the Officers. But, in its defence, it really isn't a line of work that is suited to TV.I am abit 'odd' in that I love the legal complexities of planning, and can often be found buried in all 7 volumes of the Encycloedia of Planning Law or the 5 volumes of Development Control Practice. But there's no way I could ever try to put all of that into layman's language and sometimes speaking to clients or complainants it is obvious they have no grasp of just how complex it can be, plus there is rarely a right or wrong answer, not only are many planning decisions based upon the subjective judgement of an individual or small group of people, but also in terms of the actual written legislation and regulations you'll always find a raft of case law supporting two completely different points of view.I understand what you say about neighbours, but people totally disregard the costs that applicants incur in seeking planning permission.In terms of planning applications, if you look at any 'major' application that is submitted it is accompanied by a raft of supporting reports/statements/assessments covering a whole host of matters. Needless to say those reports take a great deal of time to prepare, both in terms of research and the actual preparation of the report.Aside from the cost of commissioning those reports, the applicant has to pay a sizeable fee to the Council just for them to determine the application. During the determination process all the relevant statutory consultees have to be consulted and invited to make representations.Let me give you an example of a case I'm currently involved with. We put in a major application to a Council for a client, with the application fee payable to the Council being over £40k. The GLA and TfL raised some concerns, so my client withdrew the application and we resubmitted a revised scheme having addressed all those concerns. Fortunately a client, if they re-apply within 12 months of withdrawing, gets a 'free' application (only one free go though). So the revised scheme is going along nicely, we have meetings with the GLA and TfL, all of which this Council is aware of. We get 11 weeks into the determination process and every statutory consultee has raised no objection to the application and both the GLA and TfL support it. The Council has 13 weeks to determine a major application. I have been pushing the Council from the start about the timescales, as it took them 17 days from validation date to even bother to send out letters to statutory consultees. They realise they can't determine the application within the timescale (it needs to go to committee for a final decision), and a failure to do so will affect the Council's performance targets. After 11 weeks and 4 days, and totally out of the blue, I get a call from the Council saying that the Council's own Urban Design Officer and Highways Officer are objecting to the scheme, despite the GLA's Design Team and TfL's Highways Team being perfectly happy. A statutory consultee should respond within 21 days of the application being registered (6 weeks in the case of the GLA), and of course the Officers now mysteriously objecting work in the same building as the Case Officer, so there's absolutely no justification for why, through no fault of me or my client, we are being placed in this position.I 'go mental' (in a professional way), have a meeting with these Officers who basically only want a little bit more clarification about a couple of minor points. However no matter how soon we can address those points, because it's too late for the Council to report it to committee within 13 weeks, my client is told to either withdraw the application again or get it refused. So my client has to decide whether to :(a) take a refusal and incur all the costs of putting together an appeal, not to mention the delay (a public inquiry appeal usually takes between 10 months and a year to be determined).(b) withdraw the application and essentially resubmit the same scheme just with a little bit of further information (which was prepared within a week) but have to pay another planning fee of over £40k for doing so.The general public has this stereotypical impression that every developer is dodgy and unscrupulous, solely interested in financial gain and wants to tread all over surrounding residents, but the vast majority of developers aren't like that and in fact suffer just the same frustrations as the public in dealing with the Council, so there are two sides to the story.In short it isn't the responsibility of a Council to take into account matters that do not fall within the remit of planning when making decisions on applications. I totally understand your concerns about lorries doing damage to pavements etc, but even in layman's terms there's clearly no way a Council could refuse to grant planning permission for a housing development on the grounds that one day Joe Bloggs delivering materials to the site might mount the pavement, because (a) driving over the pavement isn't covered by planning legislation, and (b) how can the applicant control what Joe Bloggs might do in the future ?.The only way a Council can have any planning controls over the type of matters you mention are via conditions imposed upon the granting of planning permission. Such conditions could include a need to submit details to the Council for approval before works start of how deliveries will be made to the site. The problem with that is if details are subsequently submitted and approved but the developer doesn't follow them the Council is left in this situation :1) It can't say the whole permission is void because the condition doesn't strike at the heart of the permission - i.e. just because Joe Bloggs has driven his lorry over the pavement this doesn't mean that the Council wouldn't have granted planning permission for the development in the first place.2) If it goes down the usual remedy for breaching a condition, which is a Breach of Condition Notice, once that notice is served it takes 28 days to come into effect and only after that 28 days does the recipient have to comply or face prosecution. So, like I recently posted in relation to a condition imposed on a permission saying no work before or after certain hours, in reality a Breach of Condition Notice is completely pointless, because in planning terms for 28 days the work could go on 24/7, or in your case the lorries could drive over the pavement for 28 days. Hence that's why action shouldn't be taken under planning legislation but under other relevant statutory legislation, eg. the Highways Act or the Environmental Protection Act (for noise etc).Anyhow what meant to be a relatively short point has turned into a longer one, even if it isn't that helpful I hope it is at least informative.
Adam Beamish ● 6250d