Southend-on-Sea City Council (20 010 725)
Category : Planning > Planning applications
Decision : Closed after initial enquiries
Decision date : 22 Feb 2021
The Ombudsman's final decision:
Summary: Mr X complains about the Council’s failure to impose a planning condition to a planning permission to a house in his area. We will not investigate this complaint because there is insufficient injustice to warrant investigation.
The complaint
- Mr X complains about the Council’s failure to impose a planning condition to a planning permission to a house in his area.
The Ombudsman’s role and powers
- We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’. In this statement, I have used the word ‘fault’ to refer to these. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint. I refer to this as ‘injustice’. We provide a free service, but must use public money carefully. We may decide not to start or continue with an investigation if we believe:
- it is unlikely we would find fault, or
- the fault has not caused injustice to the person who complained, or
- the injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement.
(Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended)
How I considered this complaint
- I have considered the comments of the complainant and the Council and the complainant was given an opportunity to comment on the draft decision.
What I found
- Mr X says that the Council failed to impose a condition on a planning permission for work carried out to a house in his area requiring that details of the wall, gate and railings be submitted for approval.
- Mr X lives at least 100m away from the house which, itself, is not listed but in a conservation area.
- I appreciate that Mr X is concerned about the state of the conservation area but I am not persuaded that the effect of this alleged omission would cause significant personal injustice to Mr X such as to warrant investigation.
Final decision
- I do not intend to investigate this complaint because there is insufficient injustice to warrant investigation.
Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman