DEMOCRACY SOCIALIST STYLE

YOU CAN STILL COMMENT. HOW REASSURING.

Shropshire Council once warned that the Government’s new planning rules would erode local democratic oversight. Now those rules are arriving, Councillor David Walker tells us we can still comment. Well, that makes everything all right then.

There is something wonderfully comforting about being told that you are still allowed to speak after somebody has changed the rules governing who actually has to listen to you. That, in essence, is the message being offered to the people of Shropshire as the Government’s new National Scheme of Delegation comes into force on 31 October.

Councillor David Walker, Shropshire Council’s Cabinet Member for Planning, has been quick to reassure residents that they will still be able to have their say and that relevant planning matters will continue to be carefully considered. He has also described Shropshire Council as a ‘high-performing planning authority’ and suggested that the practical effect of the new system here should be less significant than in many other places.

How reassuring. For one dreadful moment we might have imagined that the great democratic tradition of typing an objection into Shropshire Council’s planning portal was under threat. Fear not. The keyboard survives. What happens to your objection afterwards is rather more interesting.

The Government says the purpose of the new national scheme is to bring greater clarity and consistency to planning decisions, allowing committees to concentrate on the applications that really matter while more routine or technical cases are determined by professional officers. There is nothing inherently objectionable about that. Small government should mean fewer unnecessary layers, quicker decisions and officials being allowed to do the jobs taxpayers employ them to do.

What small government does not mean is moving more power into fewer hands and then calling the result democracy because the public can still fill in a comments box. Under the new arrangements, local objections and councillor call-ins will no longer create an automatic route to committee. The Government guidance is explicit that existing constitutional practices allowing ward councillors to require committee consideration, or using objection thresholds to trigger referral, will no longer be possible.

So a resident may object, their councillor may share the concern and the parish council may agree that something is badly wrong, yet none of that by itself guarantees that elected members will ever determine the application. Still, you got your chance to comment. Do try to look grateful.

What makes Councillor Walker’s present reassurance particularly interesting is that Shropshire Council sounded rather less relaxed about all this when it still had the opportunity to oppose it. In July 2025 Walker introduced the Council’s response to the Government’s planning reforms. At that time Shropshire Council opposed the proposed national scheme of delegation and argued for retaining a local approach precisely because it wanted to preserve local democratic oversight and the role of town and parish councils.

That does not make Walker a hypocrite. Shropshire Council lost the argument, Parliament changed the law and the Council now has to implement it. But the concern did not disappear merely because the Council lost. If reduced democratic oversight worried Shropshire Council in July 2025, it ought still to worry Shropshire Council in October 2026. The law changed. The principle did not. What seems to have changed is the sales pitch.

The mechanics of the new system explain why this matters. For applications covered by Schedule 2, officer delegation is the presumption unless the nominated planning officer and nominated committee member agree that the case should go before committee and that it meets the statutory gateway. If they cannot agree, the Government guidance says the case must be determined by officers.

There is a certain administrative elegance to that arrangement. The question is whether democratic scrutiny is required, the officer and elected representative disagree, and the solution is officer determination. Heads I win, tails democracy takes the afternoon off. That may well speed things up, but it undeniably gives professional judgement greater weight, and that means the competence and integrity of the people exercising that judgement become more important.

The new system relies heavily on the integrity and competence of the Planning Department. Do the people of Shropshire trust their integrity and competence? Answers on a postcard please, and address it to the Leader of Shropshire Council.

That is not an accusation that planning officers are dishonest or incapable. It is a rejection of the rather extraordinary idea that public administration should ever be designed on the assumption that officials will always be right. Planning is technical work. Evidence can be misunderstood, documents can be overlooked and professional judgements can prove wrong. That is not scandalous. It is human. The scandal begins only when a system becomes so dependent on professional judgement that mistakes become difficult to challenge and reasoning becomes difficult to see.

Which brings us back to Councillor Walker’s description of Shropshire as a high-performing planning authority. Shropshire Council’s own planning pages currently warn applicants that increased workloads are causing longer processing times while the service works to reduce backlogs. Its enforcement service says there has been a significant increase in enquiries and that there is a delay even in logging cases.

Perhaps this is the modern definition of high performance. The backlog is apparently performing extremely well. The point is not that a backlog proves incompetence. It does not. The point is that grand claims about performance should always be tested against the rather messier reality experienced by the people using the service.

The Alternative Council’s investigation into Buttercup View at Mile Bank Road in Whitchurch provides a much more serious example of why that scrutiny matters. Our investigation has not been about objecting to a housing development simply because somebody dislikes it. It has centred on what Shropshire Council knew while the planning process was continuing and what happened to that information afterwards. (So much for integrity and competence)

Internal correspondence obtained under environmental information legislation showed that serious controversy surrounding drainage, disputed land and Welsh Water representations was known about before a later planning decision was taken. That does not prove wrongdoing. What it proves is that relevant information existed and was known.

What did they do after they knew?

Under the new regime, that question becomes more significant, not less. When officer discretion increases, the documentary trail behind that discretion becomes essential. If evidence is judged not significant enough to justify committee scrutiny, the public should be able to understand why. If conflicting technical information exists, the reasoning should be visible rather than reduced to the familiar reassurance that everything relevant was carefully considered.

The Government at least appears to recognise this danger. Its guidance says councils should keep records of cases considered for committee referral, including the outcome and reasons, and that those records should be reported regularly and made publicly available. Shropshire Council should embrace that requirement enthusiastically. After all, if the planning service is as high-performing as Councillor Walker tells us, publishing the reasoning behind its decisions should present no difficulty whatsoever. Sunlight tends to cause problems only when somebody prefers the shade.

There is one further twist. The national guidance does not require every Schedule 2 application to be considered for referral. Councils may decide which cases enter that process and may operate a triage system before the nominated officer and member consider them. So before an application reaches the gateway for possible committee scrutiny, somebody may first decide whether it deserves to be considered for the gateway at all. A gateway to the gateway. Only local government could respond to demands for streamlining by inventing an administrative waiting room.

Again, there is nothing inherently improper about triage. The problem comes if the public cannot see how it works. If an application involving serious controversy never reaches committee consideration, residents should be able to understand why at the time, not eighteen months later after somebody submits an information request and the Council begins an archaeological expedition through its email system.

This is where the philosophy of small government matters. The Alternative Council does not want planning committees clogged with trivial applications, and routine matters should be dealt with quickly and professionally. But smaller government only works if responsibility becomes clearer rather than more obscure. When professional judgement replaces democratic scrutiny, the reasoning behind that judgement must become easier to examine, not harder. Otherwise ‘streamlining’ becomes one of those wonderfully convenient official words meaning that the public sees less while the organisation gains more room to manoeuvre.

Councillor Walker understood the importance of local democratic oversight in 2025, and he should remember it now. The real issue is not whether residents can still submit comments, because they can. The real test is what happens when those comments contain evidence that is awkward, inconvenient or capable of changing the outcome. Accountability means being able to see whether that evidence was recognised, how it was treated and who ultimately made the judgement. From 31 October, the people of Shropshire will still be allowed to speak, which is very generous of everyone concerned. The more important question is whether those exercising the power will actually be required to listen, and whether anybody will be watching closely enough to notice when they decide not to.

THE ALTERNATIVE COUNCIL

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