From 31 October, the government is stripping Wandsworth councillors of their vote on the planning applications residents object to most: house extensions, loft conversions, dormers and small housing schemes. Council officers will decide them instead, however many neighbours object. The government made the rule in July, and the council had no say in it.
Until now, if an extension or loft conversion next door would take your light or look into your garden, you could ask your ward councillor to have it decided in public, by elected councillors, and enough objections from the street would ensure greater scrutiny. From 31 October, neither works. An officer reads the objections and decides alone, and neighbours have no right of appeal against the decision.
Living in a conservation area makes no difference. The government has kept open a route to a council committee for listed buildings but not for conservation areas, and while large areas of Putney are within conservation areas, few houses are listed.
The council has made no announcement. The first public mention came on 10 September, and it came from a volunteer. Michael Jubb chairs the Conservation and Heritage Advisory Committee, ten members of local amenity societies, including the Putney Society, who advise the council on conservation areas and old buildings. He raised it himself, at the end of the meeting. Nothing in that night’s papers mentioned it.
Jubb, who represents the Battersea Society, was critical of the decision.
“It’s not a national scheme of delegation, actually,” he told his fellow committee members. “It’s a diktat from the government, restricting the powers of planning committees.”
He went further. “It is something that fundamentally changes the role of planning committees, and in our case a planning application committee,” he said. Every application the committee had discussed that night would, he said, “henceforth from November be determined by officers, not by PAC.” PAC is the Planning Applications Committee, where councillors currently decide planning cases in public.
No officer replied. Jubb asked for a report on how the council intends to respond, and closed the meeting.
Councillors will still vote on housing schemes of ten homes or more, along with listed building consent, advertisement consent, tree preservation orders, and retrospective applications, where someone builds first and applies afterwards. The pattern holds throughout: the smaller a scheme and the closer it sits to your home, the less say you get; the larger and further away, the more say residents keep.
Constitutional change
Wandsworth has to change its own constitution before 31 October, or risk its planning decisions being open to legal challenge. It has two meetings left to do it: the General Purposes Committee on 13 October, which can recommend a change, and Full Council on 21 October, which can adopt it.
The council’s leader, Cllr Robert Morritt, did mention the change at Full Council on 15 September, in passing. Labour councillor Michelle Cook had asked him about the council’s new rules for councillors’ questions, which she called confusing. “We have to amend some standing orders because of changes the national government is making in respect of delegated authority for planning matters,” he told her. “So there will be an opportunity.” The opportunity he meant was a chance to revisit the question rules.
Minutes earlier, he had told the same meeting that his administration has no majority on the General Purposes Committee, the committee that has to recommend the change.
To have a say, contact your ward councillor and ask two things: what the council plans to change in its constitution, and who will be its nominated councillor and nominated officer. That pair will decide which larger applications still reach a public committee after 31 October.
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