LETTER: Accountability to taxpayers

All of us are having to spend far too much of our time repeating again and again coherent and legitimate objections to successive planning applications based on one unavoidable fact: the infrastructure for such schemes simply does not exist from almost every standpoint.

But it has also told us something which many of us have suspected for years about many of the decisions which the council has made, frequently in the face of and contrary to widespread local opposition: that the risk of years of ‘planning by appeal’, to use its own leader’s words, has been a significant factor in that decision.

This cannot, and should not, ever be the case. Councillor Wall adds insult to injury by almost always referring to using professional advice to justify the council’s decisions. Firstly, he overlooks the fact that there are many of us in the District, both in employment and in retirement, who have spent our careers dealing with these matters and who comprehend, apparently better than he, the place of professional advice in the decision-making process. Secondly, that professional advice, from whatever source and whatever it’s quality, does not have primacy over the council’s accountability to its taxpayers. The council has no such accountability to private developers, quite the contrary.

David Lewis

Grey Alders, Lindfield

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