THEY KNEW. THEN A “SENIOR OFFICER” GOT INVOLVED.

Why is the truth so difficult?

Yesterday, The Alternative Council published evidence showing that the concerns surrounding Buttercup View were not some sudden revelation that dropped unexpectedly onto Shropshire Council’s desk accompanied by a collective gasp of astonishment.

The concerns were already there. They had been raised, discussed and circulated. Councillors had been made aware of controversy surrounding the development, officers had been drawn into correspondence and questions over drainage and the planning history were already very much alive.

The increasingly uncomfortable question for Shropshire Council is no longer whether anybody knew.

It is what happened once they did.

Now another email trail has emerged, and this one moves the story considerably further forward.

On 24 September 2026, Shropshire Council’s Planning Enforcement team was asked whether documents had been removed from the planning portal and whether the pre-commencement planning conditions had actually been fulfilled before development began.

Neither question requires the services of Sherlock Holmes.

The Council holds the planning records, operates the planning portal and imposed the planning conditions. One might therefore imagine that discovering what happened to its own documents and whether its own conditions were complied with would involve little more than checking the file.

Apparently not.

The following day, Planning Enforcement replied:

“This matter will be discussed with a Senior Officer following which you will receive a response in due course.”

And there it is.

Arrogance in the extreme. Two simple questions about the Council’s own records, and apparently the public must wait while somebody senior decides what sort of answer they are entitled to receive.

A Senior Officer had suddenly entered the story.

Perhaps that was entirely routine. Perhaps every awkward question about planning records at the Guildhall is solemnly carried upstairs for senior consideration before anybody risks releasing an answer into the wild. Perhaps there is some undisclosed protocol requiring management approval before the words “yes” or “no” can safely be exposed to daylight.

Whatever the explanation, five days later the promised response arrived.

And somehow the questions still had not acquired answers.

Instead, Planning Enforcement referred backwards to an information request from November 2025 and suggested that any further request should be directed through the Council’s information-request process.

It is difficult not to admire the manoeuvre.

A question asked in September 2026 travels upwards to a Senior Officer and then, having apparently reached the summit of municipal administration, the answer travels backwards almost a year.

Why is the truth so difficult?

If the planning record is complete and the relevant conditions were properly dealt with, Shropshire Council should have little difficulty demonstrating that. Any document legitimately removed, replaced or superseded should leave behind an ordinary administrative trail explaining what happened and why.

That should not require five days of contemplation by an unidentified Senior Officer followed by a guided tour of last year’s correspondence.

Unless, of course, the difficulty is not finding the answer.

Perhaps the difficulty is giving it.

That is what makes this latest correspondence so interesting. Planning Enforcement expressly said that the matter would be discussed with a Senior Officer. Something therefore appears to have happened inside the Council between 25 and 30 September, yet whatever discussion took place did not produce a clearer response.

It produced one that was arguably less direct.

We still do not know who that Senior Officer was or what advice followed. What we do know is that two current questions concerning the integrity of a planning record ended with a reference to correspondence from the previous year.

That is not speculation. It is the chronology contained in Shropshire Council’s own emails.

And chronology may become extremely important.

The Environmental Information Regulations 2004 do considerably more than ask public authorities to be vaguely helpful when confronted by inconvenient questions. Regulation 19 addresses interference with records after environmental information has been requested. Where the statutory conditions are met, altering, defacing, blocking, erasing, destroying or concealing a record with the intention of preventing disclosure is a criminal offence.

The legal threshold matters. Documents can legitimately be superseded, files can be wrongly indexed, portals can malfunction and officers can make administrative mistakes. Indeed, if administrative incompetence were itself a criminal offence, local government would require considerably larger prisons.

But once questions arise over whether documents have disappeared from a public planning record, timing ceases to be a trivial detail.

There should be an audit trail capable of explaining what happened. There should be some record showing why a document ceased to appear, whether it was superseded and how that decision was made. If everything happened perfectly properly, that record should provide Shropshire Council with the easiest possible means of ending the speculation.

Explain it.

Instead, what we presently have is correspondence showing Planning Enforcement escalating questions about the planning record to an unidentified Senior Officer before eventually referring the matter backwards to an information request made almost a year earlier.

That may have an entirely innocent explanation.

The problem for Shropshire Council is that unexplained behaviour has a nasty habit of looking increasingly less innocent the longer the explanation remains missing.

Yesterday, we showed that concerns surrounding Buttercup View were known.

Today, the story has moved on.

Direct questions reached Planning Enforcement. Planning Enforcement decided they required senior involvement. Five days later, the questions that prompted that escalation still had not been directly answered.

Somewhere inside the Guildhall is the identity of that Senior Officer. Somewhere there should also be a record of what was discussed and why the eventual response took the route it did.

The Alternative Council intends to find out.

Because Shropshire Council may have become remarkably accomplished at moving difficult questions around the building, but the questions themselves are proving irritatingly unwilling to disappear.

And perhaps that is the real problem.

Why is the truth so difficult?

To borrow Shakespeare’s words from Hamlet, it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion:

“There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.”

THE ALTERNATIVE COUNCIL — WATCH THE STORY…

▶ Watch The Alternative Council on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thealternativecouncil

Scrutiny, Transparency and Accountability — For Those Tired of the Silence.

Silence is not neutrality — it’s complicity.