I wholeheartedly agree with Nick Wilding (Your Say, October 3) that the process of public participation in the planning process needs a thorough overhaul.

However, as you would expect, my reasoning is quite different to his. I find his attack and slurs directed at planning officials most unnecessary and unfair. They are merely doing their job and do not have the freedom he has to leap into print in their own defence.

Planning is a technical business, bound by certain rules and procedures. Applicants have to conform to these and objectors should ensure they understand the process and similarly abide by these procedures.

As Nick Wilding should know, every planning application must be vetted by the council's planning officers to determine the extent to which it meets local, regional and national policies. In the light of this process, officers then make their decisions and recommendations to the elected members.

The Garden Street application for a site in central Hebden Bridge was inevitably controversial – but was treated by planning staff in the normal way.

The planning committee of elected members is not like other committees. It has a judicial function and like any court jury it is not supposed to be lobbied by either side in advance of the public hearing. Any member, so lobbied, is required to declare an interest and stand down.

At the end of the hearing, having received an assessment and recommendations from their professional officers, councillors receive the viewpoint of both objectors and applicants.

If councillors choose not to accept the professional assessment of their officers, they are obliged to give their reasons – reasons which must be related to previously agreed and published policy issues.

Without the above process, applications could easily be defeated on any whim or fancy of a committee under pressure or because they simply did not like it. That would certainly not be democratic.

As the chair of the committee, Councillor Martin Peel, pointed out at the Garden Street hearing, planning is about issues not numbers. This is why he and the planning officers pressed ("interrogated" in Mr Wilding's terminology) elected members to be precise about their reasons for rejecting the application.

The public are also entitled to know and grounds have to be specified to form the basis of any future appeal or judicial review.
Councillors should know this too. They are elected (and nowadays paid) to do a job, to do it according to the rules, effectively and in the interests of the common good – not just the interests of a highly vocal mass of objectors.

Despite this, not all councillors have the bottle to face a baying crowd and others who perhaps hope for future electoral success by playing to the gallery – forgetting perhaps that their prime responsibility is to the planning principles previously democratically established by their own council.

This is what caused the confusion at the end of the Garden Street meeting on September 29 – members proposing rejection without really knowing why, objectors standing and waving suggestions, and officers simply seeking clarity as they have to deal with the aftermath. Very ingenious of Mr Wilding to criticise them for this.

So, I entirely agree with Nick Wilding, public participation in the planning process is morally flawed. New procedures are needed to impose the same requirements and discipline on objectors as applicants, to prevent inaccurate and misleading presentations, devious and underhand lobbying... to make the whole process open and objective on both sides.

David E Fletcher