In article , Peter
Crosland writes
And the statistics to prove this are where exactly?

Look at the planning inspectorate website, you have to search through
the individual cases to see which ones have been permitted, I have a
complaint going through them at the moment which is why I got interested
in how many were being passed at appeal level, do you know different?
We have had a couple of absolutely scandalous developments passed
locally which were opposed by everyone except the planning inspector and
the developers


Obviously I don't know about the individual case you refer to. However, to
substantiate your statement one has to look at it on a vaild statistical
basis i.e what percentage of appeals were successful in one period compared
with another. The last time I looked at this locally it did not alter much
from year to year. What many people don't comprehend is that inspectors have
to make a judgement based on planning law rather than bowing to local
opinion. It is not unusual for a council's paid planning staff to recomend
approval and have this ignored by the council members.

Peter Crosland

Our local cases prompted me into looking at the planning inspectorate to
see if things had changed, at the same time I found out that the
inspectorate is now way behind in dealing with cases, now put this
together with the Deputy Prime Minister wanting to increase the numbers
of houses being built by raising the density of development and you come
up with a scenario where the pressure may be on for the inspectors to
let more appeals through. This is the conclusion I came to anyway so I
started looking at the recent appeals to see how many are
approved/refused which is why I made the statement The planning Portal
is a useful site with lots of appeal cases on it.
BTW the local cases were refused by the planning department *and* the
committee before being successful at appeal. The inspectors reports
supporting their decision have been shown to be nonsense and in one case
where the buildings are now complete, the reasons for the original
refusals have been shown to wholly correct.

--
David