Summary: We will not investigate Mr X’s complaint about how the Council decided to grant planning permission for a nearby property extension. This is because there is not enough evidence of fault in the way the Council reached its decision.

The complaint

1. The complainant Mr X lives near a property where the Council granted planning permission for an extension. Mr X says the Council’s delegated report misrepresented details of the planning application, gave an incomplete and incorrect assessment of the facts and disregarded Mr X’s concerns. Mr X says the Council pre-determined the application.

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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.

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How I considered this complaint

3. I considered information provided by the complainant and the Council and relevant on-line planning documents and maps.
4. I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.

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My assessment

5. We are not an appeal body. This means we do not take a second look at a decision to decide if it was wrong. Instead, we look at the processes an organisation followed to make its decision. If we consider it followed those processes correctly we cannot question whether the decision was right or wrong.
6. Mr X says the Council made errors assessing the planned extension and its impact on his property. He says the Council did not properly apply its policies on assessing the impact on nearby amenities. This includes not applying the ’45 degree rule’ properly.
7. The Council’s delegated report considered the planning application’s impact on the amenity of neighbouring properties. The report referred to the relevant policies and explained how the Council had reached its view that the extension did not cause such amenity impacts to justify a refusal of the application. As part of this assessment the Council applied the 45 degree rule to assess the impact to the rear amenity in line with its residential development and household extensions supplementary planning document. This document does not require the Council to apply the 45 degree rule when considering the impact of development on a front elevation.
8. Overall, the Council assessed the location, scale and design of the extension against the relevant planning policies. It determined the extension did not have an adverse impact on Mr X’s amenity significant enough to warrant a refusal. The Council was entitled to take this decision based on its professional judgement. There is not enough evidence to show the outcome was predetermined or that the Council did not take into account relevant considerations including Mr X’s objections and it is therefore unlikely we would find fault in the decision-making process.
9. Mr X is unhappy the Council did not visit his property and says it mis-represented his response to a request to discuss the proposal with him in person. But the Council did not have to visit Mr X’s property or discuss the planning application with him in detail. If Mr X considers that the Council’s delegated report mis-represented him then he can ask the Council to change the report under his right to rectification. If the Council does not do so, Mr X can then make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
10. Mr X says the Council failed to keep notes of its meetings with the planning applicant but this does not change the fact it considered the proposal acceptable. It is therefore unlikely we could say this wrongly affected the outcome of the planning application.
11. He also says the planning application was submitted without the full and correct documents. But even if this is the case it is unlikely we could say it caused significant injustice to Mr X. The Council could have requested more documents if it felt they were necessary. The officer’s delegated report says sufficient information was provided to consider the application. If the Council wrongly validated the application then this is still unlikely to have affected the outcome; the Council would still have considered the relevant points to decide whether the extension was acceptable in planning terms and we could not say further information would have changed its decision.

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Final decision

12. We will not investigate Mr X’s complaint because there is not enough evidence of fault to warrant an investigation.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman