Planning - a key activity
Each month the Society receives details of all planning applications submitted to the Planning Department at London Borough of Bromley in the Chislehurst area. We also receive information of decisions, appeals and other actions in respect of previous applications.
The planning sub-committee reviews all this information. Members of the sub-committee have a great deal of knowledge and experience in planning rules and Bromley's Unitary Development Plan. It also takes into account comments or objections made by members of the Society, and where appropriate will have informal discussions with planning officers.
The sub-committee reviews its conclusions with the Executive Committee, and then writes formally to the Planning Department setting out objections to proposals, or observations, where it believes that conformity with planning policies needs to be checked, or that any approval should have conditions attached.
It is most important that members of the Society advise the Committee, either direct, or through Road Stewards, where they believe an objection to any planning proposal is needed.
During 2010 the committee reviewed 443 applications, and submitted objections in respect of 35 (8% of the total) and observations on a further 22 (5%). This is pretty much the same as in 2009, and reflects the continuing low level of development taking place during these difficult economic times.
Until recently we have reproduced on this site lists of planning applications and decisions for the Chislehurst area. However, the planning portal on Bromley's own website has recently been upgraded, and if you are looking for information about a particular location or area, it is now much easier to find this directly on the Borough's site.
First you should access the site - http://planning.bromley.gov.uk/online-applications/
If you are likely to be a regular user of the site you can register, and the system will then save the enquiries you make, to save you time in the future.
If you are not registered, and wish to use the site only once, you then have a number of choices:
- you may make a simple enquiry, if you know the details of the application you are concerned about, or
- you can go into advanced mode, where you are able to interrogate the system in terms of the application or the dates, or
- you can ask for the weekly or monthly lists (which we used to reproduce here), or
- you can provide details of the property you are interested in, or
- you can pick a location on a map (though our experience is that this is very slow).
Because this is now so straightforward, and enables members to save details of their search (for example in their post code area, or street), then we believe that the work involved in us reproducing the information is time and money wasted.
We would welcome your feedback on the new system, which we will forward to Bromley.
The Society is in the process of acquiring a community map of Chislehurst, which we will populate with latest planning information relevant to Chislehurst. We hope this will be available in the autumn of 2011.