The local news this evening featured a Green PPC spouting on about how unfair it is that councillors do not have the right to overrule a planning inspector.
Let's be clear about this, the planning inspector applies the law of the land and like it or not, this should be the basis on which planning applications are made.
Does this dim Green want a return to the bad old days when applications could be turned down on a whim with no way of redress ?
Sadly it was just blatant populism from the Green and showed exactly why he is a Green and not in a party capable of winning a parliamentary seat.
2 comments:
This sits a little uneasily with your following post lamenting the sentences passed down by judges who are similarly acting in accordance with the guidance they are provided with.
Though I agree that the sentences are much too light and (against my better self) can only hope we can rely on internal 'prison justice' to do the necessary with these failures of contraception.
What we need of course, is more prisons - I wonder, idly, if this is LD Justice or Treasury policy and whether there breathes any single LD Councillor who would not immediately start a Focus-led campaign against a proposed new prison 'on their patch' (pace Mr. Titley).
As a former councillor, I know a fair amount about the planning system, and with my wife being a qualified town planner, she knows a little more.
Before the more modern planning rules there were councils where you could not get planning permission unless certain firms of solicitors were employed to argue your case. There were other councils where a word and an envelope to your councillor could ensure a permission is passed or rejected and worse still, there was not course of redress.
People forget that councillors are there to appy the law, to the letter of the law, and as such planning is quasi judicial.
Now for the point on judges, there is a framework withing which they must work. However, dishing out the most lenient of sentences for the most senior of crimes seems to go against the principle of our legal system.
Many people who plead guilty to such crimes won't get such lenient sentences, so you'd have to ask where the incentive is within the sentencing structure to encourage people to plead guilty ?
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