Decision report 201205188

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.