The list below is a record of advice the Planning Inspectorate has provided in respect of the Planning Act 2008 process.
There is a statutory duty under section 51 of the Planning Act 2008 to record the advice that is given in relation to an application or a potential application and to make this publicly available. Advice we have provided is recorded below together with the name of the person or organisation who asked for the advice and the project it relates to. The privacy of any other personal information will be protected in accordance with our Information Charter which you should view before sending information to the Planning Inspectorate.
Note that after a project page has been created for a particular application, any advice provided that relates to it will also be published under the ‘s51 advice’ tab on the relevant project page.
Advice given between between 1 October 2009 and 14 April 2015 has been archived. View the archived advice.
Enquiry
I am currently reading the Environmental Statement, to ensure that any representations engage directly with what the application.
I find that the problems created by the length and complexity of the Statement are greatly exacerbated by the following:
1. the parts are out of order: your/the Developer's listing of the 45 documents does not appear to be arranged logically - or at least not by any method I have been able to discern - why is this?
2. the titles of many of the individual document listings give no indication of the nature and significance of their contents - why not?
3. problem 2 is compounded because the Developer has in many cases bundled together unrelated documents, so that e.g. a significant appraisal of noise effects is found under scores of historical maps - who does that help?
4. problem 2 is further compounded because the Developer has in some instances used identical titles for different documents - why has that been allowed? (I can see that your listing attempts to overcome that by adding detail but the underlying situation remains unsatisfactory)
5. there are other irritating inconsistencies in the Developer's titling which, though relatively minor, tend to add to an impression of disregard for public accessibility.
In short, the documentation is difficult to access and navigate. The presentation is so opaque that it gives rise to the suspicion that the applicant has got something to hide.
Be that as it may, the problems seem likely to rebound on the relevance of the representations coming to the Examining Authority and ultimately on the purpose of the process.
Mindful that the UK arrangements must comply with European norms and standards governing planning applications of this kind, can you please ask the Developer to sort this out?
Advice given
The manner in which application documents appear on the National Infrastructure Planning website is an ongoing issue which arises from the way in which our internal databases 'talk' to the website. At present there is not a practical solution.
However, to resolve the issue in principle, for each project we produce an Examination Library which arranges the application documents and all representations etc made to an examination in a logical order. An Examination Library for the Manston Airport application/ examination has been published and can be accessed by clicking the large blue button under the Documents tab: attachment 1
You may also be assisted by the Applicant’s Navigation Document (Doc 1.4) available here: attachment 2;stage=app&filter1=Application+Form
