CALL that planning? “It’s time to scrap the planning appeals system,” John Gummer, the Conservative MP and former Environment Secretary, writes in Planning (Aug 25).
He argues that almost every appeal fails, the costly process can take years and how decisions are finally reached is far from clear. Overall, he says: “Successive governments have undermined the primacy of the local planning authority and allowed for second-guessing as a means of meeting political objection.”
Gummer believes that decisions should be made locally and appeals inspectors should no longer be allowed to review new evidence. “Appeals would then cease to be a rehearing of the proposals and become a means of ensuring that the original decision was properly taken.”
At present, battles over local planning permission can get ugly, agrees Community Care (Aug 31). The not-in-my-back-yard aka Nimby brigade have developed sophisticated arguments and now couch their opposition in politically correct terms.
“These days (the arguments) are very rarely about ‘we don’t want mad people in our road’; they tend to be more about ‘opening this service will create more traffic’ or ‘this is quite close to a number of different schools’,” says Paul Corry, the head of public affairs at Rethink, the mental health charity. “It’s more discrimination by innuendo than direct discrimination.”
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But charities such as Addaction, the drug and alcohol treatment agency, are fighting back. Hugh Jobber, a project services manager at Addaction, put stories in local papers to break down opposition to a needle exchange in Walsall. Anonymous parents spoke out about their heroin-addicted children’s need for the service.
“We were trying to humanise the issue and it worked pretty well,” Jobber says.