Summary
Mr C represents a number of local residents opposed to an ongoing planning application. He wrote to the council with concerns about the lack of a transport assessment in relation to the application. Mr C did not believe the council had responded to his letter. When the council clarified the items of correspondence that they believed responded to the letter, Mr C was dissatisfied and brought his complaints to us.
After discussing this with Mr C we decided that the only matter we could consider was the failure to address points in his letter. We tried to resolve this with the council, but Mr C remained dissatisfied and resubmitted his complaint to us. We decided that the council had not reasonably addressed some of the concerns Mr C had raised and that it was unreasonable that they had not identified this until we became involved.
Recommendations
We recommended that the council: apologise to Mr C that their responses to his letter and subsequent related contact were not reasonable; provide a reasonable response to Mr C's enquiries; and review their practice to ensure that correspondence querying the relevance of their complaint responses is properly considered without the need for SPSO involvement.
Related reading
View Decision Report 201205188 as a PDF (12.94 KB) Updated: March 13, 2018