Links: News story from SAVE Britain’s Heritage, planning committee papers, meeting video.
For those interested, here’s a little bit of context from someone who was a councillor (and member of this committee) from 2013-2018. There are several long-running failures at Norwich City Council that have led to the failures of local democratic process which occurred at this meeting, whether or not you agree with the outcome.
Some of the blame should be placed on the councillors themselves, particularly those who did not attend the whole meeting – they should take responsibility for the decisions they participate in, and be there for the whole item, or send apologies if they know they cannot attend a full meeting. However, the fault cannot entirely be placed on them.
Training for planning committee councillors is almost non-existent (at least it was when I was there), and what training there is is poor. We had perhaps an hour’s introduction to the planning policy framework, and then another hour on ‘probity in planning’. Neither were sufficient to give councillors a proper understanding of their role within the planning system, and its quasi-judicial nature.
Relatedly, there is a culture within Norwich City Council of planning committee members fearing that if they engage with an application in any way prior to a meeting, they might become pre-determined, and therefore be told they could not participate in the decision. This often leads to them refusing to speak to anyone with an interest in the application or planning officers ahead of the meeting so that they can’t be accused of pre-determination, but leaving them unprepared for the (often quite complex) decision-making they are then to undertake.
The planning committee planners are there to advise the councillors, not overrule them. If they thought it likely that councillors were going to vote against (which they should have done), they should have been prepared with advice that would respect the councillors’ role as decision-makers, even if they hadn’t specifically been approached by councillors. There has long been a failure to distinguish within their committee reports between aspects of planning application assessment that are statement of facts, and aspects which are the planning officer’s professional judgement on matters of planning balance. Clearly any councillor seeking to deny the facts of a case should be challenged by officers to ensure they don’t inadvertently make a decision based on false information. However, when it comes to matters of planning balance, councillors should be allowed, indeed assisted, in coming to their own judgement, guided by the planning officer’s advice. When I was a councillor, I often joked with my colleagues about the frequency of the phrase ‘[it] is considered’ within committee reports, which I used as a cue to indicate where something was the planning officer’s opinion, and therefore something councillors could challenge and come to a different conclusion.
If you’re curious, that phrase appears thirteen times in the committee papers for this application. A diligent councillor could have (and indeed did, in the case of Councillor Stutely) taken any one or more of those instances and justified their decision to vote against the application by taking a different view to the officers on that score. As an example, in assessing the “Environmental impact, Energy and water efficiency”, the report says “The applicant states that refurbishment, while potentially reducing upfront embodied carbon, is not a realistic option for this particular building.” and then later in the same section “The proposal is considered to comply with the requirements of [the relevant policy]”. It should have been acceptable for a councillor to say that they disagreed with the applicant’s opinion on this, and that therefore they have come to a different conclusion to the officer with respect to compliance with this policy.
Lastly, the chair of this committee should, in my opinion, resign. The conduct of the meeting falls squarely on their shoulders, and having two contradictory votes on an item shouldn’t have been allowed, and could have been avoided if they’d followed correct procedure. When I was a councillor, it was generally thought better procedure, if there was inclination from the committee to refuse an application, the motion to refuse would be taken first, and only if this motion failed would a motion to approve be taken. Even if that doesn’t happen, it should still not have been possible for a later motion to essentially overrule a previous decision of the committee, and the application should have been non-determined, rather than approved. It was also totally unnecessary for the chair to call for an adjournment to determine reasons for refusal. Plenty of reasons had already been given, with reference to policy. The officers’ behaviour, where they were trying to defend their view, rather than assist the councillors, was unacceptable, and effectively blocked the democratic process from occuring.