Ernie Clark. Hilperton Division, Wiltshire Council.

A small, but important, victory in planning battle.

One of the things the Conservative led Wiltshire Council (WC) has tried to do with the new planning system is to remove as much democracy as possible.

Under WC, parish and town councils lost their power to 'call-in' applications to committee, and your Unitary Councillors also found themselves tightly constrained as to what they could call-in. Even when an application gets to committee the public are now severely restricted in the amount of time they get to speak on applications they support or object to.

However, following protests from Wiltshire councillors, a small concession has been made. Previously there were some types of application which only officers could deal with. These include advertisement consents, listed building and conservation area applications. Now, councillors are to be allowed to call these to committee when they have the potential to be controversial.

The next step will be to get the WC 'cap' on speaker numbers at planning committee meetings removed and allow the Chairman of each meeting to decide how his/her meeting will be run and how much democracy will be allowed.

I know that certain councillors dislike having to sit and listen to members of the public explain why they either support or oppose spacific planning applications. My comment to these councillors would be 'If you don't want to listen to people, why are you a councillor in the first place? Furthermore, why volunteer to sit on a planning committee if you're more interested in keeping the meeting short rather than making it democratic?'