SIR

Your front-page article on the HMSG car park noted that the County's Planning Committee had twice rejected the application to turn the front gardens of the two houses in The Gardens into a school car park, in the second application by 12 to nil votes of our elected representatives.

It seems a strange negation of democracy that the unelected Planning Inspector for the Assembly is able to come along and decide the opposite. Our planning system permits him to do this because HMSG lodged their appeal before the Committee had decided the matter, as they were entitled to do, and the Committee did not make their decision within the statutory eight weeks, as they should have (though the delay was small).  The Inspector can then decide the matter without regard to the views of our representatives. 

One lesson from this is that MCC Planning Committee should take the Planning Department to task for not bringing the application to decision within the required time.  In effect, the Committee were wasting their time in considering the application, since the decision they took was inevitably overtaken by the Appeal Inspector. There is no excuse for delay, since the second application was essentially the same as the first.

Moreover, in this case the Committee had taken the opposite view of the MCC officials, who recommended approval for the application.  This makes it more important for the Committee to be given the application on time, since delay can manipulate the outcome by sending the matter to the appeal Inspector, another planning official, who is likely to support the planning officials since he judges purely in terms of planning regulations and sees no reason to bring local judgement into the matter.

The consequences of these narrow interpretations of planning regulation are obvious all around us, with development detracting from our environment instead of enhancing it.

The second lesson is that our planning system is a mess. We may often object to what our Planning Committees decide, but at least they are our democratic representatives, and are better placed than the planning officials to take a view on what most of us are prepared to accept. 

Indeed, I believe the County Planning Committee should also take more account of the Town Council recommendations than they seem to do, since local planning should be decided locally.

Obviously, we need an appeals procedure for refused planning submissions, but the Inspector should be required to give good weight to the representatives' judgement whether it was out of the prescribed period or not, and overturn their decision only when proper procedures have not been followed, or where there is some wider strategic consideration.  In turn, the Inspector's decisions should be accountable in some way to our representatives. Otherwise this makes a mockery of democracy.

Phil Bly

(Monmouth)