Sir: In Leo McKinstry’s article, he puts the blame (as
we all would) at the point where the result disagrees with his wishes. That happens to be the new planning ombudsman, but anomalies of the type he writes about happen at many different levels. Here in our small town, for example, someone applied for permission to open a take-away right on the busiest road-junction in the town. A petition urging the planning authority not to allow the shop was signed by many local people, worried that customers ‘just popping in’ for a takeaway would park at the junction, making the traffic problem worse than it is already. The town council discussed the application and unanimously recommended rejection. But the planning authority, which is the district council, whose offices are ten miles away, passed it without visiting the site, apparently because all the planning requirements were fulfilled by the application and no objection was raised by the highways department of the county council, whose offices are 18 miles away.
‘Local empowerment’ denied once again. But this time the villain was not the Labour government but a Conservative-dominated district council. Until local empowerment has real teeth, it cannot be expected to bite.
Ian Baird
Framlingham, Suffolk
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