Could you please tell me the Wokingham County Council Planning Department policy on: Notifying planning applicants notification of the intent to refuse permission.
1. Could you also provide the average time, across all residential applications in 2022 and 2023, between notifying the planning applicant of the intention to refuse permission, offering the option to withdraw the application and the subsequent issuing of the notice.
We do not have a policy on this. There is no statutory or local requirement to notify applicants or their agents of the Council’s intention to refuse an application. In fact, it is the Council’s procedure not to divulge the recommendation on an application. Where, occasionally, a planning officer does indicate to an applicant or agent that an application is likely to be refused, the officer might save a note of a conversation or an email on the application file but does not record it in any central IT system. Therefore, it is not possible to answer question 1 as the information is not recorded in this way.