Part 4 - The Ombudsman
Firstly I must apologise for the amount of time it has taken to provide the final post on this issue. However despite initially making a complaint to the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO) in February, it took until November for me to receive any reply. The investigator advised that he had been out of the office over the summer and the complaint was not dealt with in his absence.
I initially sought the Ombudsman's assistance on behalf of the local residents when there appeared to be evidence of pre-determination. This evidence was not surprising to many residents – was it possible for a Committee to make an impartial decision, when they in fact act within the body making the proposals (i.e. the Council)?
The Ombudsman did nothing to investigate the complaint despite being presented with the evidence.
After the decision I contacted the LGO again (March), in reply I was advised to contact the offending Council direct with my complaint. This apparently was the required procedure except in exceptional circumstances, further to which if the matter was not resolved I should contact the LGO again. As the Council had not adequately investigated/responded when the issues were raised on a number of occasions during the planning process, I wrote to the Ombudsman declaring that this was in fact an “exceptional circumstance” and that an independent review was required. It could not be accepted by the local residents that the Council could find any malpractice on their own behalf.
The Ombudsman ignored this request and advised that the complaint had been referred to the Council to be dealt with via the Council's own Complaints Procedure.
The Council “investigated” the complaint and determined that their practice/policy was not to pre-determine applications.. The Council's response failed to provide any evidence to indicate that a full/proper investigation had been undertaken and they continued to quote doctrine (i.e. what “should” happen) rather than address what had “actually” happened.
I referred the matter back to LGO (May) repeating our request for an independent review. Their response (when finally received) was that having “investigated” the complaint, there was no evidence to suggest pre-determination (not commenting on that provided). In addition we were advised that public money “could not be wasted” solely because a decision had not gone our way.
No evidence has been provided to suggest that this matter was fully looked into and many people have questioned how independent the LGO actually is.
From this website you will see that there are many other people with the same concerns
Over 150 local residents situated at and around the proposed site objected to the plans, the Councillors (none of which were local) approved them. Do we really live in a democracy?
