Examination of Witness (Questions 448
- 459)
TUESDAY 11 APRIL 2000
MR CHRIS
SHEPLEY AND
MR BRIAN
DODD
Chairman
448. Can I welcome you back to the Committee
in the sense that you were here fairly recently to deal with our
inquiry into fairgrounds. Could I ask you to introduce yourself
and your team for the record, please?
(Mr Shepley) My name is Chris Shepley, I am the Chief
Planning Inspector, and my colleague is Brian Dodd and part of
his responsibility is to deal with Rights of Way, so he is here
particularly in case you have any questions on that topic.
449. Do you want to say anything by way of introduction
or comment before we go into questions?
(Mr Shepley) No, thank you, Chairman.
Mrs Ellman
450. Are you confident that you will be able
to maintain your timetable targets for planning appeals when the
first round of district-wide local plans start?
(Mr Shepley) Yes, I am. First of all I can report
to the Committee that we did meet our targets in the year just
finished. This year's targets are slightly tighter. We are confident
that we will be able to meet those. Next year's targets, that
is assuming they stay the same for 2001-02, are tighter still
and are getting close to the limits of what we can achieve given
the ability of the parties to present evidence on time. As far
as the district-wide local plans are concerned, we carry out surveys
of local authorities every year to try to assess what the likely
workload will be for the next two or three years. There is so
far no sign of a major upturn so far as local authorities are
concerned and from the information they give us we have always
found local authorities are over-optimistic about the speed with
which they can bring district-wide plans to inquiry. We will continue
to do that. I suspect there will be an upturn at some point. I
think we will not get inquiries of the kind we had in the first
round. Our experience of those reviews that have come to us is
that they are simpler and more straight forward than the original
inquiries were. We need to make sure that we have the resources
available for an upturn in cases.
451. Do you keep records of your handling times
for things such as advertisement appeals and Rights of Way Orders?
(Mr Shepley) Yes, we do.
452. Why do you not publish these?
(Mr Shepley) We do publish most of those
in the Annual Report. They are not high level Hansard targets
in the way section 78 planning appeals are, but we do have targets
for enforcement cases, advertisement cases, and for other work
and that is published in the Annual Report.
Chairman
453. They are not high level Hansard cases?
(Mr Shepley) Yes.
454. Does that mean you can avoid answering
the questions on disproportionate costs?
(Mr Shepley) I do not think so. I think we would answer
questions on those if asked at any time.
Chairman: I was just puzzled by the phrase.
Mrs Dunwoody
455. Is there a degree of accuracy, fairly accurate
for Hansard, mildly inaccurate for whatever comes next, totally
inaccurate for something that you might get in the tabloids?
(Mr Shepley) No, I think I need to explain. Each agency
has targets and Hansard targets are usually restricted on the
advice of the Cabinet Office and the Treasury to half a dozen
targets, so they could not cover the whole range of the work.
Ministers have concluded in the past that local plans, for which
we have high level targets, and section 78, for which we have
high level targets, are the most important areas of our work.
So those appear, along with cost targets and quality targets,
as so-called Hansard targets and ministerial targets. We have
a whole range of other targets on which we check closely dealing
with other areas of our work.
Mrs Ellman
456. Do you think that there should be separate
timeline targets for major and minor decisions and do you distinguish
between those different cases?
(Mr Shepley) Yes, we certainly would. I think the
targets, as you know, are 80 per cent of cases within a particular
timescale. There are a number of reasons for that. The main reason
for the 20 per cent is that it is always recognised a major case
inquiry taking three months can never be dealt with within a normal
timescale. Internally we set our own targets for this which, again,
are not secret on a case by case basis.
457. Do you think you could make a greater use
of instant decisions in simpler cases?
(Mr Shepley) We would have no problem with that. There
have been various experiments over the years with advance notice
of decisions and, indeed, with instant decisions. In a period
in the late 1980s when the Inspectorate was under particular pressure
there was no particular demand for those. A recent proposal that
in householder cases we should issue a decision rather than a
decision letter, in other words something looking like a local
authority decision which simply said "allowed subject to
the following conditions or dismissed", that proposal in
consultation was not particularly well received and in the 1998
consultation paper was put on hold. This is really a matter for
the DETR but I think the general response has been that there
is no great demand for that. As far as we are concerned, if there
were a demand for it we would be happy to do what we could and
I am sure we could do that.
458. I would like to clarify your answer to
an earlier question about handling times for advertisement appeals
and Rights of Way Orders. Do you publish those handling times
in your Annual Report?
(Mr Shepley) They are in the Annual Report, yes.
459. They are clearly there?
(Mr Shepley) Yes.
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