Discharge of Conditions - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)
Open group
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Started - July 2012
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Last activity - Yesterday
Discharge of Conditions
We are currently dealing with the discharge of a number of pre-commencement conditions on several housing schemes, which are causing us significant problems due to the poor quality of information being submitted by applicants. As an example we are now on the 6th submission in relation to a highways conditions, the consultant who has been employed is a structural engineer rather than a highways engineer and despite our best endeavours he is struggling with the fundamental concepts of highway design. My question is has anyone ever actually refused to discharge a condition, or do you keep going back again and again till they get it right? Clearly, this has cost my authority significantly more in staff time than the £97 we have received for the discharge of several conditions and I am now coming to a point where I feel enough is enough.
You most definately can refuse to discharge conditions and the grounds you have highlighted would be reasonable. My local LPA (Chorley) refused to discharge some on a barn conversion approval for similar reasons to those you identify and that permission is still not implemented, the site has been sold on to a new client who engaged me to re-submit a completely new scheme (hence why I know of the refusal to discharge the previous conditions)
Mike, I can understand the frustrations - but I think that the question is surely about whether you want this development to be built out in order to meet the councils housing objectives. Although it annoys, maybe this applicant needs some more hands on help with getting the design correct. Do you have access to a highways engineer who could give some more specific help?
Thanks Chris that is helpful. Phillipa, I think this is the conundrum with are in, in that we want to support the scheme, but the agents acting on behalf of the developer have sub contracted it out to someone who is not competent. Rather than hand holding, I am more inclined to say we will do this for you, but we will charge you for it.