The Voice of Spalding and South Holland
Members of a South Holland Parish Council are set to debate a complaint about the district planning chairman at a meeting tonight (Thursday).
Long Sutton Parish Council was contacted by a resident after he saw an email on the district council’s website which seemed to suggest objections to a planning application were ignored.
The email was from Coun Roger Gambba-Jones (pictured) to a member of council staff.
“You can obviously ignore the attached objections to the application,” it said.
Long Sutton Parish Council’s planning group had a raft of objections to a proposed housing development on Seagate Road.
But Coun Gambba Jones said that the staff member he was emailing had no decision-making role and he was in no way advocating ignoring the parish council.
The email continued: “I could answer most of the questions but they’re unlikely to accept it coming from me as opposed to an officer unfortunately.”
Resident Martin Dickinson said Coun Gambba-Jones should have chosen his words more carefully.
“On face value it looks as if he is influencing members of the council by suggesting the 21 objections be ignored,” he said.
But Coun Gambba Jones said his email was never intended to be construed that way.
“My email was to the manager of the planning policy team leading our work of the production of our next Local Plan. He does not have any responsibility for determining planning applications, hence my comment about not needing to make reference to the comments.”
It would seem that the Chairman of the panel makes a habit of this and perhaps shouldn’t be in that position. His words to me being that I am requesting radical changes to a retrospective planning application that affects my home, but they are happy to view them as a mere minor with no objection seems to contradict itself. Especially when the STIPULATED conditions they put on the first plans were never even followed, he will not “punish” the builder in his words, so what was the point of making the conditions in first place ? let the builders do as they please as we don’t care is how his email actually translates !
Don’t believe him for a second.