Criticise Council planners and you’re ■■■■■■■■■■■■

Concerns spread about Hastings Borough Council (HBC), a local planning authority with heavyhanded and authoritarian inclinations. They censor local opinions and a national magazine. ‘Redaction’ – black tippex, editing out – is rife, for no good reason. Bernard McGinley reports on being careful what you say.  (Some but not all of the cases mentioned concern his own objections.  The groundless deletions have been going on for years.)

The fake-olde plastic lampposts on Hastings Pier generated dissatisfaction and continue to. Formal approval from HBC came in two stages (oddly) by its planning committee: in June 2024 for Listed Building Consent, and in August for Planning Permission. One of the many objections to the applications was made on 23 July, reproducing coverage in Private Eye, the current affairs magazine. (For non-readers, the supposedly scurrilous funnies and the serious commentary are kept separate.)

The version on the Council’s website was this:

The suppressed text could have been ‘competent’ or ‘fairminded’, but actually it was ‘this lax’, which is relatively complimentary. A formal complaint about the censorship was made on 26 July and finally responded to on 10 September (in a letter unconvincingly dated 21 August), longer than the stipulated period for reply. At one stage the Council sought clarification on the matter, as if they didn’t understand what a heading of ‘FORMAL COMPLAINT STAGE ONE’ meant.

Eventually the response was essentially one of indifference, or entitlement: 

This statement was considered to be derogatory in respect of an officers ability to do their job and was therefore redacted in accordance with the councils criteria for redaction. Therefore, council officers consider that the redaction is justified in this case.

The poor punctuation seems to be copied from the Council’s website.

With a Council so unreceptive to comment and viewpoint, a Stage 2 complaint is unlikely to be heard any more sympathetically, or competently, or differently. The Council don’t want to be criticised (in the sense of ‘evaluate’, not ‘slag off’). They have a legal duty however to publish timely comments on planning objections that meet the criteria, and they have failed in that duty.

Criteria for ‘derogatory’

So what’s derogatory? The word is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as ‘showing strong disapproval’ and ‘not showing respect’. On that basis, the recent Grenfell report was derogatory about Kensington & Chelsea Council (and others). Should it have been heavily redacted therefore, or not published?

HBC claim the right to edit and have several criteria for redaction. These include offensive comments such as the use of racist language, unfounded allegations against the council or staff, especially regarding alleged criminal activity, and foul or abusive language or inappropriate or derogatory comments in respect of an officer’s ability to do his or her job. (It is a weakness of the policy that it says nothing about well-founded allegations.)

Rother District Council more crisply say:

The Council reserves the right to reject any comments which in its opinion contain comments that are deemed to be potentially libellous, defamatory, threatening, abusive or contravene the provisions of the Equality Act 2010.

Those safeguards are reasonable, but can still be abused. The redacted material here was not in any way excessive or abusive. Two issues arise:  how much respect is the planning department deserving of? Not much if they suppress adverse criticism to the point that they can’t in practice be disagreed with.

Secondly, there is the free speech of the objector, protected under law. No-one rational assumes that Council officers or members necessarily agree with the many opinions received. That does not however give the Council the right to put black tippex on statements they dislike, including a national news magazine, in a serious column founded by John Betjeman as Nooks & Corners of the New Barbarism, and continued by Professor Gavin Stamp.

Selective policies                             

The Council’s application of standards is highly selective. The decision letter on case HS/FA/24/00125 was forthright about some elegant windows on Cuckoo Hill:

The proposal results in a discordant and incongruous feature that does not have sufficient regard to its context and harmfully affects the character and appearance of the Town Centre Conservation Area and as such is not accordance with the aims of Policies DM1, EN1, HN1 and HN2 of the Hastings Local Plan, and Paragraphs 197, 199, 200 and 202 of the National Planning Policy Framework.

The matter is now being appealed to the Planning Inspectorate. It is striking however that at the very same committee meeting (June 2024) HBC were indifferent to the character and appearance of Hastings Pier and its Conservation Area. Do those policies and paragraphs apply here too? Apparently not. This looks like inconsistency and laxness.

A description of the Pier lampposts as a bastardisation was censored but later the Planning Services Manager conceded the point.

Censorship

HBC has long form when it comes to suppressing comment that’s critical of it. Censorship is a way of life in Muriel Matters House.  A Rocklands case (HS/FA/22/00339) had an objection comment on the website:

. . . There are other reasons to object.
2. %comments removed%
3. %comments removed%
4. %comments removed%
5. %comments removed% . . .

14. The application cannot be passed its present form as it lacks collation of relevant information. Please refuse it instead — for reasons including %comments removed% and lack of a retrospective submission.

The missing words in para 14 are ‘intentional unauthorised development’, concerning building work that was provably intentional, unauthorised, and a development: a clear ‘material consideration’ in the jargon. Planning took no enforcement action about the unauthorised ramp, claiming incorrectly that the ramp had been in place for more than four years. Officers refused to read evidence submitted by the public while simultaneously accepting the word of the developer without any supporting evidence. The application was passed. This is one instance among many why HBC have such a bad reputation.

Sometimes bona fide planning objections have been treated by officers as complaints about HBC, required to have a maximum length of two pages. There is no constitutional basis for this. It is a device deliberately misused to suppress public comment.  What there is a basis for is openness and transparency:  Part 5 Appendix 1 of the HBC Constitution is that old ribtickler, the Planning Protocol, including in para 2:

This Protocol seeks to ensure openness, transparency, fairness and consistency in planning decisions and to ensure that the planning process operates properly, legally and effectively.  

Another objection (by the present writer), to application HS/FA/23/00328, was published as: 

 

What foul abusive stuff was this? The suppressed words were ‘neoMaoist’ (because of the sloganising), ‘pretentious’ (nearly all applications do without a Concepts and Philosophy statement), and ‘SHOUTY’ (because the statement document was all in capital letters). For HBC however, objectors are not entitled to their opinions.

Examples of censorship are many. A published objection on solar panels at Rocklands (HS/FA/23/00344) by a qualified ecologist reads in full:

Dear Sir/Madam,
I object to this application for a number of reasons.
%COMMENT REDACTED%

This is insulting. How much respect do HBC expect for treating people like this?

Even species aren’t mentionable. For application HS/FA/24/00244, public comments online include:

. . . forms of wildlife including %COMMENT REDACTED%, birds, reptiles, bats and slow worms. Plus any great crested newts that remain there.

There are %COMMENT REDACTED% who meander along Conqueror Road cul de sac and we believe there may be a %COMMENT REDACTED% within the woodland area of the proposed site.

HBC officers deny free speech, while its Validation Unit shows a repeated failure to dispute even the most gormless or inaccurate or absent answers on application forms: thus making them looking even more gormless. The claim to vet stuff for ‘inappropriate comment’ is clearly untrue.

Some cases (from many)

Azur on the seafront near the Royal Victoria Hotel is an HBC building, and always has been. The reason it has become a slum over this century is that the owners (the Council) allowed it to.

Some years ago, members decided that a Fern Road appeal should be contested. Planning officers decided among themselves not to bother. The matter was raised by a Councillor at the planning committee meeting of January 2012, to the embarrassment of the Chair, who preferred to discuss the matter privately.

Soon after there was the Rocklands landslip and the Bunker scandal. The Council’s ‘Procedural Review’ (aka the Bahcheli Report) discussed the many errors (including in section 8.3), but the lessons-to-be-learnt weren’t, and it has its 10th anniversary next month. (Para 4.7 memorably states:

. . . and there is a statutory duty to pay special attention to the
desirability of preserving or enhancing a conservation area.) 

Much later, regarding an objection to application HS/FA/20/00470, references to enforcement query ENF/20/00325 were black tippexed five times, as though it were Top Secret or even derogatory, and not just a reference.  This is the case where planning officers asserted that they had measured the depth of the Bunker balcony by eye, and that it conformed to specifications (having been extended ‘temporarily’). This is – at best – laughable, and otherwise negligent:  another disingenuous performance by the planning department.

An objection (again by the present writer) to HS/FA/22/00687 (Upper Maze Hill) was given the redaction treatment, with these expressions tippexed out:

not abused | crude editorialising | Could it be because the owners want it that way? | obliteration | faked | euphemise [later unredacted, apparently a token gesture] | insultingly | opportunism and vandalism .

These Park Beck cases had several reports in HOT (such as ‘Assault on Conservation Area 13’), and all the deleted terms are accurate and tenable.

Non-enforcement Enforcement

Repeatedly Council Enforcement does in effect nothing, which is why the Pier is another slum. Elsewhere (unsurprisingly it was Rocklands) there was an enforcement enquiry (ENF/20/00076) but it was peculiarly suspended, rather than the case (HS/FA/20/00470) being suspended till the enquiry was completed. The planning department’s lack of consistency is marked, and claims to best practice are unfeasible. Site visits by the planning committee apparently no longer happen. Regarding the Pier lampposts, committee reports’ statements of ‘an enforcement case’ were actually about an enforcement enquiry, a much lesser entity: not a legal instrument, merely a query — an exchange of emails probably.

As the Bahcheli Report pointed out:

The object of any enforcement action is [to] remedy the breach of planning control in the wider public interest. [Para 6.5.20]

In 21st century Hastings, the public interest is an also-ran. The Council is repeatedly in breach of paragraph 59 of the National Planning Policy Framework therefore, about maintaining public confidence in the system, through effective enforcement.

An instance of non-enforcement Enforcement is enquiry ENF/21/00091, about the status of the Stade Amusement Park fence. It was not mentioned in the committee report for HS/FA/21/00946. Instead, mention of it was suppressed in an objection of December 2022 (again by the present writer). The objection also suggested ‘a dereliction of duty’ by the Foreshore Trustees (who represent HBC), and that was redacted too.

The missing words are:

careless or contemptuous | trusted | ENF/21/00091 | dereliction of duty

and again the use is entirely reasonable given the facts of the site history. How the Stade Pathway by the Boating Lake came to be blocked has never been explained, nor if it will reopen, nor the basis of that reopening.

Now HBC have censored a national publication. It was Private Eye’s own article. Had the objector written it the case reference would have been cited.

Necessity as falsehood

HBC’s black tippex redaction of a national publication remains bizarre. What is defamatory or abusive (&c.) about the words ‘this lax’ is impossible to see. In the 1993 case of Derbyshire County Council v Times Newspapers Ltd and Others, the Law Lords of the House of Lords (at that time the ultimate authority) held that such organisations may not sue in defamation, because they are government bodies and should therefore be open to ‘uninhibited public criticism’. They also decided that such a suit would be incompatible with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, on Freedom of Expression.

There is nothing inappropriate in having an opinion that the officer advice was lax. The view is widespread that with a history such as theirs, the Council planning department is as straight as De Cham Road. Developers are indulged. Residents get redacted. No doubt the Council would take the view that these powers as used were necessary. William Pitt the Younger in the House of Commons in 1783 had views on that humbug:

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves.

The spiteful and self-serving antics of HBC are in their way like the modern Parliamentary device of the ‘Henry VIII clause’: the government will decide what suits the government. HBC officers don’t like their errors being pointed out, and frequently stop it or block it, and have long since forfeited the benefit of any doubt about this abuse of power.  (As an added effect, committee members don’t get to read the censored parts of censored statements, leading to injustice and a disservice to democracy.)

The Council’s practices are arbitrary and authoritarian. Often they treat local residents as a nuisance. With a record of carelessness, shabbiness and pettiness like theirs, it’s not derogatory to note that their low public esteem is self-inflicted. Evaluating HBC with informed comment is not ipso facto derogatory. The Council planning department lacks professionalism, but it doesn’t lack laxness for developers, and is evasive both of the truth and good process. It remains authoritarian and heavyhanded: bullying, obstructive and less than competent.

HBC planning officers’ statements deserve scepticism. Hastings deserves a significantly better planning department.

(This article was lightly amended on 20 September.)

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