West Cumbria Mining - latest position.
If there is one thing which unites supporters and opponents of the planning application from West Cumbria mining for a new mine to extract metallurgical coking coal to be used to make steel from under the sea off the coast at St Bees, it is that both are frustrated by the delay in taking decisions about it.
When the first planning application was submitted there was considerable concern that the original planning application took two years to determine. There were actually very good reasons for that, because this was an incredibly complicated proposal, and major aspects of it had to be completely rewritten and a fresh consultation held on the revised plans, and a huge range of issues had to be investigated properly and a fully comprehensive report prepared for the DC&R (Development Control and Regulation) committee of Cumbria County Council.
At the end of those two years planning officers eventually provided the committee with a 188 page report giving massive amounts of detail about the proposals. Part of the reason for doing that was to make sure that the council not just did everything possible to take the right decision but to be seen to do everything possible to consider all the issues so we did not get tangled up in a judicial review. Presentations from the officers, interested parties (including myself as one of the two local members) and debate took IIRC about six hours.
So it was incredibly frustrating that after all this we then had to wait for months while the government considered a vexatious request from an MP representing a seat on the other side of the county to call the application in, and a further wait of more months as a result of a request for Judicial Review.
Now we are waiting for an amendment to the application to come to committee.
It had been hoped that the application would reach the DC&R committee on 20th August but that meeting had to be cancelled because the report was not ready.
I have been asked various questions about who took that decision, whether councillors were involved, and at what stage the report had reached.
I've pursued the matter and have heard back from the senior planning officer involved, the county council's Manager for Development Control and Sustainable development.
He confirms to me that the reason for the delay was that the planning department was waiting for evidence from independent specialists. In the absence of that evidence the report had not been completed and it going ahead without it, not postponing the meeting, would have been a failure of due process.
The officer confirms to me that he took the decision to postpone the meeting and that no councillors were involved in that process.
It is now hoped - and I emphasise that this should be taken as an indication and absolutely not as a commitment or promise - that the application will come to committee on 2nd October.
Comments
Scrutiny is the responsibility of various completely different committees.
Intelligent people who are thinking of posting criticisms about someone usually first consider how to avoid demonstrating that they don't understand the first thing about what the people they are insulting actually do.
Anonymous trolls don't - because if they were intelligent, they wouldn't be trolls.
But let me remind you that the email went out after normal working hours and his name is not going to be the one on the officers' report. That responsibility lies with the Executive Director for Economy and Infrastructure. So if any responses weren't in on time that time should have been considerably earlier than close of play on 13 August, which suggests to me that there was a breakdown in planning in the planning department.
It refers to a group of councillors who have no direct responsibility for providing the service concerned - and thus have no conflict of interest in asking probing or difficult questions which might embarrass the people running it - who examine in public how a service run by an executive arm of the council or another body is functioning and can call those responsible to account.
If you look at the list of CCC Committees at
https://councilportal.cumbria.gov.uk/mgListCommittees.aspx?bcr=1
you will see that there are eight bodies listed under Scrutiny - all of which actually have the word "scrutiny" in their titles.
Three of these bodies have scrutiny functions relative to the NHS, one keeps an eye on the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) and three scrutinise respectively the county council's functions for Adults, for Children and Young People, and for Communities and Place.
There is also the Scrutiny Management Board which looks at the overall functioning of Scrutiny and deals with any requests to "call-in" (e.g. challenge) an executive decision.
Under the definition of scrutiny which I gave above, none of these can or do apply to decisions by the planning committee on whether or not to approve a planning application. Such decisions are not subject to scrutiny by another council committee because they are not executive decisions. The DC&R committee have the job of saying "Yes" or "No" to the application rather than scrutinising a service.
How do the DC&RC committee members decide whether 'to approve or refuse applications' if they don't undertake a 'careful and detailed examination' (scrutiny) of the matter before them?
I have also already explained that the decisions of planning committees such as the county council's DC&R committee are exempt from scrutiny as the term is defined in UK government guidance for running councils and used in the CCC constitution.
If should be obvious that this doesn't mean that the committee will not take a careful and detailed examination of the evidence presented to them - they are expected and required to look carefully at the evidence. However, using the word "scrutiny" to describe that activity in the context of a committee whose work is specifically not "scrutiny" in the sense in which that word is used in local government is to invite confusion.
I will not be accepting any further anonymous posts on this thread - if you want to continue the discussion, sign your name. Posts after this one which do not identify the sender by all or part of their actual name, or by a consistent pen-name, will be deleted.