Summary: We will not investigate Mrs X’s complaint about the Council’s handling of her neighbour’s planning application. This is because there is not enough evidence to show any fault wrongly affected the Council’s decision to grant planning permission or caused Mrs X significant injustice.

The complaint

1. The complainant, Mrs X, complains the Council wrongly granted planning permission for an outbuilding on her neighbour’s property. She says the Council’s rationale for the decision is flawed and complains the outbuilding is dominant, overbearing and out of character for the area.

Back to top

The Ombudsman’s role and powers

2. We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’, which we call ‘fault’. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint, which we call ‘injustice’. We provide a free service, but must use public money carefully. We do not start or continue an investigation if we decide:

• there is not enough evidence of fault to justify investigating, or
• any fault has not caused injustice to the person who complained, or
• any injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement.

(Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended, section 34(B))

3. When considering complaints we make findings based on the balance of probabilities. This means that we look at the available relevant evidence and decide what was more likely to have happened.

Back to top

How I considered this complaint

4. I considered information provided by Mrs X and the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.

Back to top

My assessment

5. It is clear Mrs X dislikes her neighbour’s development and believes the Council was wrong to grant planning permission for it. But we are not an appeal body and it is not therefore our role to decide whether the development is acceptable.
6. The Council’s decision and the judgement leading to it was open to challenge at court but our role is more limited; we can only look at the process the Council followed rather than deciding whether its decision was right or wrong. Where we find evidence of fault we must decide if, on balance, this wrongly affected the decision. We do not however have any powers to overturn a council’s decision; instead, where we find fault which wrongly led to a grant of planning permission we may recommend a remedy. This takes into account the impact of the development on the person complaining. We would not normally recommend a council revokes a grant of planning permission.
7. Mrs X raises concerns about the Council’s judgement and the accuracy of statements made by the planning officer about the presence of trees and distance from the development to the closest neighbouring property. But I have seen nothing to persuade me that these statements wrongly affected the Council’s decision.
8. Mrs X is also not an adjoining neighbour and the impact of the development on her is therefore limited. She has wider concerns about the impact of the development on the character and appearance of the area but the Council properly considered these concerns in reaching its decision.

Back to top

Final decision

9. We will not investigate this complaint. This is because the evidence I have seen does not persuade me, on balance, that the alleged inaccuracies in the Council’s decision-making wrongly affected its decision to grant planning permission or caused Mrs X significant injustice. The law does not allow us to question the Council’s judgement on the remaining areas of concern raised by Mrs X.

Back to top

Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman