Venting off - Is no-one willing to make a decision themselves now?! (council case officers)

[Great_scot_selfbuild]

No response needed, I just need to rant about an interaction with the council today.

 

In my telephone call with the case officer assigned to discharging our planning conditions, she stated that she was just 'piggy in the middle', she didn't understand the tree officers' question and so had passed it on to the planning technician to answer as it wasn't for her to decide what was required to discharge the condition.

 

WTAF? I thought that was *exactly* the role of the case officer - understand the information presented and decide whether the condition can be discharged or how to do it pragmatically.

 

Background situation:

One sub-bullet within a pre-commencement condition is for a pre-start briefing to be given to our principal contractor, on site, by our project Arboriculturalist.

All other condition aspects are tidied away and our Arboriculturalist and the council tree officer know and respect each other (all good).

I asked the tree officer to contact the case officer and support the principle that the condition could be considered discharged on the basis that the brief is given on the day we start work and a record of this is passed to the council (i.e. it's being given by someone he knows well and respects, and won't cut corners - which is why we chose him). I don't want to have to arrange and pay for (yet another) non-productive meeting on site, to then wait for 1-2weeks for the council to process an email acknowledging that the brief took place before we actually start.

 

The tree officer declined my request for a phone call, asking for all communication to be via email (he then doesn't reply to emails, is only working for the council on Wed & Fri, hence why I asked for a call because otherwise the to/fro conversation takes ~2weeks). He deferred the question to the case officer to decide, who then deferred it to the planning technician (completely inappropriate and not their job) as the case officer sees her job as 'in the middle'!

 

Deep breath. I don't know why I'm in any way surprised by this, from this council.

 

I wish you all a better experience than mine.

Edited February 12 by Great_scot_selfbuild
Title correction

[Jilly]

I discovered belatedly that not all planning conditions have to be fully discharged, per se, just complied with. So could you record or film the conversation as evidence? 

[ToughButterCup]

8 hours ago, Great_scot_selfbuild said:

....

Deep breath. I don't know why I'm in any way surprised by this, from this council.

...

 

My sympathies.

Ask any organisation to do more with less, and this is what you get.

[Alan Ambrose]

Respectfully disagree. The LPA is wasting 3x the resource than if the case officer just dealt with it. Oh and the applicant’s resources too, which they don’t count.

 

I think the problem is this: all administrators are being told that they are to be machines without any judgement or common sense, just following the procedures which they know are inefficient or obtuse. Add in a bit of laziness or fear or someone who loves power play and then it becomes a wasteful administrative shit show. Steep it in a bit of LPA ‘we’re here to stop people doing stuff’ culture and there’s your recipe for meltdown.