Agenda item

A public question has been received from Mr Daniel Fulton:

Mr Daniel Fulton was invited to ask his question which had been submitted in advance of the meeting. Due to annual leave, Planning officers were unable to attend the meeting to provide a response. A written response was therefore provided, which the Chairman read out:

Through 2019, the Council a total of 61 applications/submissions subject to “call in” requests from Parish Councils and 3 application/submissions subject to Member call in requests were considered. The breakdown of these applications by type is as follows:  

As a result of the Parish/member call in requests, the following outcomes arose for each of the items:

Mr Fulton made the following supplementary statement:

“In September 2018, the leader of the council, the portfolio holder for planning, the entire cabinet, the chief officers, and the joint director for planning and economic development were made aware of serious legal defects in the manner in which the council was deciding planning decisions. The leader of the council asked the joint director for planning and economic development to undertake a review of the council’s scheme of delegation for planning decisions. This never happened.

Between November 2018 and May 2019, I contacted multiple officers and members of the council in regards to this issue and on multiple occasions wrote to the Council’s solicitors at 3C Shared Services. Still, no action was taken.

The Council persisted in issuing planning decisions under the unlawful delegation schemes, and on 10 January 2020, the Council was served with a pre-action letter indicating that the council’s unlawful delegation scheme would be challenged in the High Court.

The Council now finds itself in the position of being unable to operate effectively as the district’s local planning authority, and a large backlog of undetermined applications is currently awaiting consideration. 

Prior to this scandal, as of Q3 of calendar year 2019, the Council’s on-time performance statistic for major planning applications was 66.1%. For comparison, South Cambridgeshire District Council's performance on this measure is ranked number 337 out of 346 local planning authorities in England, or 9th from worst.

As I said, the current on-time performance statistic for major planning applications is 66.1%. This was before the Council had to effectively suspend the determination of major planning due to the lack of lawful delegation scheme. The threshold for the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities, and Local Government to designate a local planning authority as underperforming is 60%. A planning authority that is designated as underperforming loses its right to determine major planning applications, and applicants can instead bypass this Council and obtain planning permissions directly from the Planning Inspectorate.

Based on my calculations, the 60% threshold is virtually certain to be breached by this council in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarters of calendar year 2020. This will leave the council with no say on major planning applications by 2021. 

This situation was avoidable if the leader, members of the cabinet, and chief officers had not taken a nonchalant and lackadaisical attitude towards the council conducting its planning process in an unlawful manner.

Having been present at a number of scrutiny meetings and having read the minutes from the recent meetings I have not attended, I have been surprised that this committee has not more closely examined why the Council persisted in knowingly issuing unlawful planning permission for nearly a year and a half and why no one has been held accountable for these obvious failures that are very highly likely to result in the council losing its discretionary powers over major development applications.

I would like to ask the Chairman why there has not been more rigorous scrutiny of the cabinet’s and officers’ roles in this scandal, and in particular, whether at any point, any officer has advised the chairman or members of this committee not to pursue this issue within the context of the scrutiny and overview committee.”