Please do not copy D.K.'s letter below as submitted to his M.P. It is shown here to provide an excellent 'backbone' for your own letter.

You can visit the Hanley William website here.

Insert your own MP

House of Commons

London SW1A 0AA

Dear Mr

I am writing to bring your attention to a matter which I believe requires urgent attention at the highest level. It concerns the powers of Planning Inspectors following the precedent set in a recent planning application and subsequent appeal which I believe will have far-reaching consequences for all future planning matters.

The specific application to which I refer is not in your constituency; I appreciate that you are unable to intervene in such a case but wish to bring to your attention the case inasmuch as it may affect future planning matters in our area.

The particular case is the airfield application at Hanley House Farm, near Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire (Planning Inspectorate Ref T/APP/J1860/A/99/1024689/P5). The airstrip owner lodged an application to operate the strip with an aircraft maintenance business attached. The application and subsequent appeal failed based on two crucial factors: noise and the unreasonable conditions imposed by the Inspector.

The Inspector overruled the technical advice of the expert witnesses on both sides of the case and applied an unjustifiably stringent measure for assessing the noise impact. In a nutshell, the experts agreed that the appropriate measure would be a combination of an average and a maximum measurement. The Inspector decided to take only the maximum measurement. I believe this to be an abuse by the Inspector of his powers, and the precedent thus set is dangerous and undemocratic and was without doubt unfair to the applicant.

The second matter was the conditions set by the Inspector. He imposed conditions and then argued that these would be unacceptable to the applicant, using that fact to help reject the applicant's case, an argument he had no right to use, since only the applicant can decide whether the conditions are acceptable or not. Furthermore, the Inspector argued that the proposed regime to reduce nuisance arising from aviation activities at the airfield was insufficient in that the operator would have no way of controlling possible breaches of the regime by visiting pilots except by retrospective sanctions. In other words, the Inspector argued that breaches will occur because there is no effective means of preventing them and he uses this to contribute to his reasons for rejecting the appeal, despite his acceptance that such control measures "had been accepted elsewhere". The deterrent value of retrospective sanction is the very basis of our law. For the Inspector to reject any proposed regime to control potential breaches of conditions set by him is therefore patently unconstitutional and an abuse of his powers. He requires the applicant to impose a more stringent control regime than is currently required by the Law of the Land.

The significance of this is that such a ruling could be used unfairly as a precedent to reject other planning applications. As a pilot, I am dismayed by the current opposition to airfield planning matters and am very concerned that the outcome of the above case can only make things worse. All we can reasonably demand is a fair hearing but to have evidence skewed by spurious arguments and unconstitutional behaviour is both unfair and undemocratic.

I believe that the general powers of Planning Inspectors must be reviewed to ensure that:

a. expert advice is not ignored

b. any conditions, if proven to be effective elsewhere, must be accepted by Inspectors as reasonable and not overruled

c. Inspectors cannot demand any more stringent conditions than the threat of retrospective sanction, since not even Parliament is able to impose such measures.

This particular case is an extremely poor reflection on the Planning Inspectorate. The fight will go on in the case mentioned above but in the meantime, the precedent set may well be used unfairly to reject other planning applications. I would urge you to represent my views on the points of principle raised above with the appropriate Minister without delay.

Yours faithfully,