Council misleads and censors over pending planning decision

Hastings Borough Council (HBC) has refused – for no applicable reason – to publish objection statements on a planning application being decided on 20 July. The Council’s unevenhandedness is striking. Read it here instead:  there have been unauthorised works in the redline area of a current application. What should be material considerations are treated with dogged disregard by the planning authorities, who are rewriting the past. The site is Rocklands. Bernard McGinley reports on unfeasible lines taken.

Objections to a planning application (case HS/FA/22/00339) for a 

Proposed asphalt surface to existing hardcore access ramp 

are being refused publication, either in whole or in part. This in turn denies relevant information to the members of the Planning Committee, removing meaning and significance objections, and damaging confidence in local processes.

Documents and comments are being suppressed (‘redaction’). Planning objections are being treated as complaints about the Council which they are not (making them subject to different rules, supposedly). Suppressing valid details of the site’s history looks authoritarian and unprofessional.

Neither the HBC Constitution nor the planning regulations give a basis for such treatment. Censoring information in the public domain is a particular affront. Responses to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and the like are officially and legally regarded as in the public domain. But not in Hastings, where disregard of the HBC Constitution and the Nolan Principles is frequent. As the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has observed:

If the information was exempt from disclosure, we would expect this to be done when the request was submitted, rather than retrospectively engaged once the information has been published.

The Council has published its criteria about comments on planning applications, and there is nothing in the objections that warrants the current heavy-handedness. The website gives no grounds for the censorship, a practice previously noted. 

A request for information on this case was ignored. Similarly, officers have refused to read any statement longer than a page — a made-up standard. Thus Councillors are screened from objections and from the context of objections. 

The hasty redaction response is seen in another objection to these works that raised the implications of overlapping redline areas (with conflicting conditions), and other contradictions.

Oddly, the HBC comment guidelines do not include planning breaches relating to a site, though these are a material planning consideration. By any standards this is an abuse of procedure by the Council, denying elected members information. 

Instead, reference to unauthorised works in the redline area of a current application is judged irrelevant or unacceptable. This in turn affects HBC ‘s reputation, when the Planning Protocol of the HBC Constitution allows for accuracy and update. The commitment to openness and impartiality (in para 50 for instance) goes unpractised.

Rocklands

The site that particularly shows the poor record of HBC planning is Rocklands Caravan Park.  In October 2014 the Council’s ‘Bahcheli Report’ confirmed what they had already been told by the Save Ecclesbourne Glen campaign (SEG): that the notorious holiday home known as the Bunker was wrong. Bluster about ‘within reasonable tolerances’ was undone by an independent remeasurement that showed

the building was not built in accordance with its consent. It has a greater footprint, the balcony projects further, the whole building has been re-oriented and it is just over 0.5m higher. (para 6.3.2)

The Bunker is still there, but the screening required by a Planning Inspector isn’t. Effective tree protection against gratuitous felling remains an issue.  

SAM and SMC

The site is a Scheduled Ancient Monument (SAM), for its Iron Age hill fort, and for the mediæval St George’s Churchyard on the East Hill. The SAM site extends into Rocklands. The present application lacks Scheduled Monument Consent (SMC) though this is a formal, legal requirement from government-sponsored Historic England.  

Historic England commented on the application:

The existing hardcore ramp was constructed without our consultation and without Scheduled Monument Consent (SMC) in place. It is not possible to achieve retrospective SMC, so the ramp remains unauthorised. We note it is unlawful to undertake such works in a scheduled monument without consent. 

Ramped-up self-interest

In July 2021, following Enforcement query ENF/20/00325, the ramp to the Bunker was stated by an HBC planner to be an ‘unmade track’ of ‘soil and grass’:  no mention of a ramp, which does not have planning permission. It does not get it under the four-year-rule, as photographic evidence shows.

Barefacedly the planning officers’ committee report on the case states :

the laying of hardcore on the ground to form the access ramp has been evident since 2014 

and

The existing ramp has been in situ for well over four years and has been deemed previously by Council officers to be lawful in planning terms. 

How hardcore became soil and grass – and back again – is unexplained.

Application HS/FA/14/01036 was in part for an access ramp and was in 2015 refused permission. The long-running SEG campaign (whose tenacious members include Chris Hurrell and Lynne Okines) found several current issues:

1. 1. 1. 1. The four-year rule does not make the ramp lawful, merely immune from enforcement action. There is no certificate of lawful use. 
         2. The ramp is not substantially complete, so the four-year rule does not apply. 
         3. The 10-year rule should be used as the ramp was built in specific breach of the refused permission, and in breach of conditions imposed by the Planning Inspector’s permission in 2016. 
         4. The works to date were carried out without obtaining SMC.  Breaches of SMC may remove time limits on enforcement action.

See also the planning case file. The evidence indicates that the ramp was possibly built after the Council’s site visit of December 2020. 

The present application is not even ‘part-retrospective’. The application has contradictions about soakaways, which given the history of local landslides should not be ignored. 

The committee report does not even mention the site being adjacent to a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). This omission has a bearing on the potential hazards to the habitats. 

Previous form

Space does not permit mention of the many lessons clearly never learnt. Consider planning evasion and breach in cases such as HS/FA/20/00470, and HS/FA/19/00172, and EN/15/00028, or HS/TP/18/00769 where information in the public domain was vetored by HBC. There were also decisions of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), and many HOT articles.  

Sometimes what the Council say is simply unreliable, such as when, according to HBC, protected trees at Shearbarn were felled in 2021 by authority of the Environment Agency — who turned out to know nothing about it.

This follows constitutional ‘adjustment’ some years ago to increased decision-making by officers behind closed doors, under ‘delegated powers’, leaving openness and transparency as a good idea.  

Local democracy

The redactions are increasingly hazardous and dubious. The ‘public interest’ has become HBC convenience. In refusing even to read objections, there’s a faint sign of predetermination, as well as mistreating those objecting.

The present censorship has no valid reasons. Treating planning objections as complaints to the Council is (at best) disingenuous. They should not be arbitrarily limited in length, or refused acceptance, or redacted regarding valid details of the site’s history. Members of the Planning Committee should see such comments, which are not libellous but relevant. 

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