The general public may suspect some Councils are falling behind with their work, due to staff shortages, sick leave, confusion between departments, lack of properly trained staff partly due to high staff turnover.

Would you believe that your Planning Application can sit in an officers pending tray for seven weeks? And that Planning departments are refusing to adopt procedures to prevent this because officers who are behind with their work would fall even further behind if they were forced to spend time communicating with Applicants / Architects / Agents.

It is very important for the Architect / Agent to have a procedure in place to 'effectively' request information regarding any concerns that the case-officers may have.  This should be done in such a way to hold officers to account if they fail to respond.  

Being aware of information regarding concerns that officers may have, will allow an opportunity for drawings to be revised or Applicants to involve Councillors.

Pressure from Swindon's Councillors have affected the outcome of many Planning Applications.

Councillors can prevent Swindon's Planning officers refusing your application.

Planning Departments will not implement procedures to ensure all applicants have the opportunity of a few days to overcome any concerns that officers may have because this would detrimentally effect the statistics of poor performing case-officers, because if they were any slower a decision could not be made within the government target time of 'eight weeks' which would be detrimental to the Planning Departments Statistics which have to be submitted to the Audit Commission.

Surely 'some' Planning case-officers would not be cheeky enough to decide that they do not like an application after just two weeks and to avoid doing any work, just pop it back the refusal pending tray.

Surely Planning case-offices would not just fob applicants off that telephoned, by just saying sorry it's still being considered.

Surely officers do not think their opinion is superior to that of elected Councillors and feel aggrieved if Councillors make the decision for them.

Surely officers would not deliberately with-holding information so that applicants can not involve Councillors?

This depends on who the officer is dealing with and whether whey think they can get away with it.                                              Back