Government urged to end shabby planning tricks

The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) has called on the government to honour its promise to tackle blatant abuses of the planning system.

According to the CPRE, developers are holding councils to ransom by submitting duplicate applications at the same time - thus wasting public money and local communities' time.

It also claims that repeated applications are made for the same development on the same site, despite it having been refused in the past.

CPRE is alarmed that the government has taken so long to bring forward proposals to implement these reforms, and that what is proposed will fail effectively to tackle these abuses.

Paul Miner, CPRE's planning campaigner, said: "People are fed up with the shabby tricks that developers play to browbeat local authorities into accepting bad developments.

"The government says it wants both a faster, more proactive planning system and better public involvement. On both counts, these reforms should be effective and in force now.

"More and more people are becoming involved in planning. They may be householders submitting planning applications. Or they may be affected by development proposals in their local neighbourhood," he said. 

'Yet too often local people feel powerless in the face of change or shabby behaviour by developers."