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A question of courtesy about planning
• ACCORDING to a letter I have from the Local Government Ombudsman, “local authorities are expected to inform third parties as a matter of courtesy and not because it is a statutory requirement”.
In this instance, the ombudsman’s investigator is specifically referring to Camden Council’s failure to inform objectors of the outcome of a planning application for more than three months.
The application involves a three-storey block of flats at 80 Falkland Road, NW5, and was approved in March 2007, despite dozens of objections from local residents and the three ward councillors, and three previous rejections for similar plans.
Because objectors were not informed of the outcome until July, we lost, at a stroke, our democratic right to seek a judicial review against the decision (judicial reviews must be sought within three months of a decision).
So, if I am interpreting the ombudsman correctly, local authorities are entitled to do what they please and get away with it. Unfortunately, the copy of government circular 15/92 that the investigator has sent me to “illustrate the point” is missing the relevant page, so I really only have his letter to support the above contention. But the experience that objectors from Falkland Road, Leighton Grove and Leighton Crescent have had over the past year certainly bears the suggestion out.
The ombudsman accepts that aspects of the officer’s report that favoured the application were “erroneous” and also that “the time taken by the council [to inform objectors] was unreasonable and amounts to administrative fault”. Indeed in a letter hand-delivered to me at a special meeting called by Councillor David Abrahams at the Town Hall last November, the east area team manager owned up to this failure (stopping short of a formal apology).
But the team manager’s decision to blame the failure on “severe staff shortages” was surely unnecessary.
Now that we know from the ombudsman that the council is not actually obliged to inform objectors, and in light of the council’s recent accolade as one of the best-performing in the country, it is a wonder that they have admitted to any kind of failure at all!
It is of little comfort to the many residents affected by the proposal that both the team manager and the case officer no longer work for the council.
The blight of a three-storey building overshadowing our homes and gardens is apparently something we will just have to live with for the rest of our lives.
David Price
Leighton Crescent, NW5
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