Those who feel that their responses to planning applications in Devon - including the ones by Aggregate Industries for Straitgate Farm - are continually ignored, are not alone. Buckfastleigh Town Council feels the same way, and has now dissolved its planning committee 'because the authorities don't listen':
Buckfastleigh said that since the start of this council in May 2015, none of the responses submitted by the council in response to any major planning proposal in the parish had had an appreciable effect on the outcome.
“It has been made quite clear in recent years that the carefully considered and well-informed responses to planning applications to DNPA, TDC and DCC have been ignored by their planning authorities in reaching decisions. In fact BTC [Buckfastleigh Town Council] has recently lodged a formal complaint with DCC about its inability to enforce planning legislation and its misconduct in issuing planning notices in the case of Whitecleave Quarry.”
“We feel that by maintaining a ‘Planning’ committee, which is clearly impotent, we are misleading the public and misdirecting any concerns they have. We believe it would likely have more impact if all the individual councillors and members of the public made their own representations to planning authorities (although evidence is limited that this has any effect either!) and we don’t want to be duped into inadvertently acting as fodder for those authorities going through the motions of carrying out statutory consultative procedures, unless our opinion is actually given some weight.”
