Tameside Council still acting unlawfully despite extraordinary meeting

Tameside Council is still breaking the law – despite an extraordinary meeting being called to try and fix the issue.

The latest town hall meeting saw the authority vote against new government reforms on how planning applications are approved or denied, which came into effect on October 31. This is the same result as last month’s full council meeting.

Tameside is one of four councils in the country openly rejecting the planning reforms. The other three are Bolton, Fenland and Central Bedfordshire.

The government changes will effectively reduce the power of committees by reducing their size (maximum of 13 members) and the number of applications they decide on.  Under the new rules planning applications would be split into two tiers – Schedule 1 applications and Schedule 2 applications, designated by planning officers.

Schedule 1 includes smaller and more technical applications that would only be dealt with by planning officers. Schedule 2 covers larger applications, which may be brought before the planning committee, if agreed by the planning committee chair and the council’s chief planning officer. 

Local authorities across the country needed to change their constitutions to facilitate these changes and be able to continue their role as a Local Planning Authority (LPA). 

The Council’s legal officer explained that all planning decision made in Tameside would now be unlawful and no planning committee meetings can legally take place. The local authority’s legal administration called an extraordinary council meeting so councillors could reconsider the implications of not complying with the new reforms.

Reform group leader Allan Hopwood made the same point he did at the last meeting – they were being ‘asked to vote with a gun to our heads’. He says this was being pushed by the Labour government because ‘pesky residents and councillors’ are ‘getting in the way’ of them trying to reach their ‘impossible’ housebuilding target.

Labour vowed to build 1.5m new homes in England across the five-year Parliamentary term. He believes the new reforms are being forced on councils in order to help them meet their political promises at the expense of local democracy.

Cllr Hopwood added: “I don’t work for Angela Rayner and I don’t work for Andy Burnham. I have been elected by the people of Tameside.

“I work for their interests and not Number 10’s. I care about the people that put an X in that box.”

Speaking to the councillors gathered in Dukinfield Town Hall on November 3, Council leader Eleanor Wills urged them to vote for the constitutional changes to. She pointed out that continuing in this way would ‘stall future developments’ and ‘open the local authority up to costly legal challenges’ to planning decisions.

“We are tying our own hands behind our backs and leaving developments in limbo,” Cllr Wills added. “We are going to be discussing the budget soon, when we start to be subjected to costly fines from planning, where will we cut to pay for them?

“Look past the politics and look to our legal limits.”

Conservative group leader Andrea Colbourne told the chamber that her group’s position hasn’t changed. She described how these changes ‘take decisions further away from communities’.

She felt members of the public ‘expect openness and transparency’ and an ‘open role to have a say about the places they live’. 

Conservative group deputy Cllr Phil Chadwick added: “We are here because this Labour government believes local councillors are too much trouble. 

“The responsibility of this lies with the government who brought in this legislation, not the local residents or local councillors.”

He explained that under the new rules, the 8,000 objections raised against the controversial Godley Green development for 2,150 homes may not see that application brought before the planning panel. He questioned the democratic nature of this.

Tameside Independent Group leader Cllr Ged Cooney said the debate in the chamber was one of the best he’d seen in years. He said it was their democratic right to come to the town hall and do that – something these changes would take away from the people, in his eyes.

In a very local government take on the famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, deputy leader Cllr Andrew McLaren said ‘to be legal, or not to be legal – is the question here today’.

The housing boss agreed that lots of councillors are ‘really hacked off’ about these reforms, but they are agreeing with them ‘through gritted teeth’. He pointed out a number of Reform-led councils in Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Durham that have already agreed to the changes.  

Despite Labour’s best efforts to get the constitutional changes over the line, the vote still failed following a loss of 29 votes against to 26 votes for the changes. 

This means nothing will change and the council will continue to act unlawfully.

The Local Democracy Reporting Service understands that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s (MHCLG) position is that after October 31, local planning authorities must determine all planning applications in accordance with the new rules.

If their constitutions have not been updated, as is presently the situation in Tameside, their planning panel will be operating outside these rules and all decisions will be made by planning officers by default.

This also means no planning panel meetings in Tameside will be held until further notice.