Campaign ahead to prevent planning committee shenanigans

You and your team of professionals have negotiated with the council officers (planning, housing, highways, ecology, flooding, education etc.) for months, if not years. You eventually resolved all the issues and our friend, the planning officer, writes up your application for an approval. You sigh a deep sigh of relief. 

However, you are going to have to go to the Planning Committee… (there is a plethora of reasons… size, level of objection, call-in by a councillor etc.) and then it all becomes a bit of a gamble at the Committee. You then go to the Planning Committee and it all comes undone. The Leader of the Council and /or Cabinet Members show up unexpectedly and speaks against your application. The Committee takes a vote and they vote you down. 

The Head of Planning then asks reasons for the refusal from the Committee. The Committee gives the reasons and it’s all things that you have negotiated with the officers to get the recommendation for approval in the first place. But somehow this was not communicated to the Committee and if it was, they either didn’t understand it or ignored it. 

How is this possible? How can this happen? Quite easily actually! Often the heads of terms and negotiations on the BNG, affordable housing, maintenance of open space, future management of the development, adoption of roads etc. is either fleetingly mentioned in the planning report or buried on page 698, paragraph G or written in technical gobbildy-gook. So, you can’t blame the Councillors for performing their democratic duty to ensure the community cohesion and infrastructure is delivered. 

Sadly, sometimes it is also purely political. The election is looming, the administration has a majority of one, the local ward Councillor is also a key Cabinet Member they can’t afford to lose… Their inboxes were overflowing with objections. They councillors only heard one side of the story – the negative side. The Planning Committee and Councillors didn’t have anyone point out the good that could come out of the development. 

But how do you then overcome this problem? 

It is quite simple really. You need to treat the Planning Committee like polling day… You are after the votes. You need to “campaign”, you need to give the Planning Committee reasons to vote for your application. It’s a simple analogy. You are dealing with politicians so you need to think politically. If a politician is after your vote, they have to give you reasons to vote for them… They send you a leaflet with what they are promising to deliver, they have to inform you about their policies and even prove their track-record. And if they fail to convince you, you are not going to vote for them. 

If you want to get the planning committee on side, you need to know how to do it. I am very pleased to tell you that we had three large applications at Planning Committee in the last week (totalling about 4,000 homes) and we got them all unanimously consented.