Officer’s recommendations are being ignored, housebuilder warns

Taylor Wimpey's Keith George has said that in the last three months the company had seen eight applications that had been supported by officers refused permission, Planning Resource reports.

"Members flexing their muscles has become more apparent," he said, attributing their new assertiveness to ministerial influence.

The Government has been aware of councillor's asserting their power in the decision making process and in June housing minister Grant Shapps warned MP's "not to let council officers be the backseat drivers of local government".

The willingness of councillors to go against inspectors' recommendations is a temporary abnormality and is happening because the planning system is in a transitional period, the Government has said. It said that the new planning framework should not be judged on such a short timeframe.

George has warned that although Taylor Wimpey has a 'bank' of consented land which is "adequate for its current needs", the supply is depleting and the 'bank' needs to be topped up with more consented land. If the trend doesn't stop, it will become a "structural problem and not just a local annoyance", he said.

Housebuilders have accepted that as monitoring has been over a relatively short period, the figures could be a seasonal abnormality together with people "feeling their way" with the new system. George added it was "a statement of fact" that the company was seeing "more refusals against officer recommendation than we have had in the past".

We need "a smooth, orderly predictable process" to maintain current housebuilding volumes and provide for potential future increases in housing delivery, he said, but the current decision-making process is "volatile".