Update, well I have found my way to the political affiliations page and I note that there is a nice pie chart giving colours for the council's political groups and listing who the councillors are in each group:
Independent group - Blue
Scottish Lib Dems - Cream (I'm using brown because I do not have a cream felt tip)
SNP - yellow
Scottish Lab - red
Independent members group - Dark Purple
Independent Alliance group - Green
So I have made 2 lists - for wards 1 to 11 and for wards 12 to 22 (inclusive) then assigned each of the councillors from the 3 Planning application committees to their wards and then colour coded them according to their political groups.
Now I am trying to work out which of them could remain (if they wanted to anyway) if we had to have a one member per ward and keep a 3 blue, 3 cream, 2 yellow 1 red 1 dark purple and 1 green in each committee of 11 individual ward members. Much more difficult than I thought it would be...
Councillor Farlow responds
ReplyDeleteI just wondered where the party allegiance chart was going
I have been on the Caithness Sutherland and Easter Ross PARC and PAC for 4 and a half years now. If you check the voting records, it is not the norm for all members of any single party to agree very often on planning application decisions. So the exercise as you can check
from the minutes of the PACs may not be relevant.
As you know, planning decisions should be made on planning grounds. I never knew yet any planning decision that pleased everyone. It is therefore difficult to represent all of the people all of the time.
What is useful is knowledge and that the members on the committees are fully up to speed on planning understanding and trained by experience. Of course it is not an exact science. Indeed, the process may be ably served from being on the outside - being on a planning committee is in some cases a hindrance, for example on crofting issues.
APTSec responds
ReplyDeletenow that you come to mention it I don’t think the chart was leading anywhere other than to try and piece together the information from the committee reports and to find an idea as to how the committee composition could be determined. I suppose I just had my practical hat on.
Leaving that aside; as you say decisions are required to be made on the basis of what is material and what is useful is knowledge and that the members on the committees are fully up to speed on planning understanding.
Sadly the, overall impression I have is that changes to the planning system have made interacting with planning less easy.