Site Meetings - Government says NO.

The holding of site meetings for Councillors are now basically as thing of the past.

There has been proposals on new regulations on how site meetings will be held in the future with regard to planning applications. The proposal is they will now be in the form of a meeting held in the Town Hall and called an office meeting. Objectors/supports will be limited to a maximum of 10 each, chosen on a first come first served basis. The meeting will last 30 minutes and will be minuted.

Meetings will be broken into 3 areas, (a) office (b) site meetings, (c) Management referrals. This will mean that there will only be one occasion when a referral would be allowed. Site meetings would only be held on exceptional circumstances and office based meetings will be for information gathering.

There is no doubt in my mind that this smacks of dictatorship and is undemocratic. This will lead to easing of both councillors and residents from the planning system. Site meetings were one of the few times when councillors, the planning service and residents could get together and debate issues surrounding a particular plan. This gave local people the opportunity to have their say and often amendments were made to plans with both sides agreeing. Site meetings were valuable.

I am angry that councillors were not consulted on these dictatorial arrangements, I do not agree with them. My proposal in Council was basically to throw the proposal of the new arrangements out, but apparently they are being imposed upon us. However after some debate I was 'persuaded' that they would be accepted - but under protest.