Star Comment: Concerns at planning proposals
The future of planning for Shropshire could be for decisions to be taken by one central planning committee.
This would confirm the march away from localism which has been a trend in the county, in magistrates courts, and council governance, following the loss a few years ago of all the district and borough councils.
The thinking behind this potential development on the planning front is this. Shropshire Council has three planning committees, each looking at different areas of the county, and comprising local councillors who have a feel for the area and know what they are talking about when it comes to their patch.
However, the argument is that this leads to an inconsistent approach to decision-making. With there being no overview, they are all apt to "do their own thing". So, say, a housing development in one part of the county may be approved, when a housing development in another part of the county, with identical issues, is refused.
So if there was just one planning committee, they would be all singing from the same hymn sheet and there would be none of these anomalies.
All very logical, you might think. If on-patch councillors have a headstrong and cavalier disregard for the planning guidelines and ignore their officers' advice when it suits them, all that happens is that the council ends up at the wrong end of planning appeals which it has no hope of winning and cost a fortune.
The cynical might think too that one committee rather than three must save money.
Yet Shropshire is not a place where everywhere is all the same. Different places have different circumstances. Something might be uncontroversial in one town but highly controversial in another. So approving one plan and not the other is not inconsistent as such, but a reflection of the particular local circumstances.
And the reason local councillors fight so hard is that they have a feeling for the local sensibilities.
That is not, of course, to say that councillors from "away" do not care. But under the new centralised set-up which could be in the pipeline, they would be making decisions about places which are physically remote to them, which they may rarely ever go to, and about which they know not a lot.
Almost 20 years ago Telford & Wrekin successfully broke away from Shropshire Council. One key argument was along the lines that decisions affecting Telford should be made by councillors from Telford.
Wresting power from the locals in Shropshire Council's planning process would not destroy local democracy, but would make it significantly less local.
