Ombudsman complaints about planning maladministration

An ombudsman complaint planning council route exists, and it does something very specific. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman investigates whether a council administered a matter badly, and whether that caused you an injustice. What it cannot do is change a planning decision. If your complaint is that the council should have refused your neighbour's extension, the Ombudsman will not reopen that judgement, however strongly you put it.

The distinction between maladministration and disagreement decides almost every complaint, so it is worth getting straight before you spend three months on one.

What the Ombudsman can and cannot consider

The Ombudsman's jurisdiction comes from Part III of the Local Government Act 1974, and it is built around the idea of maladministration causing injustice. Maladministration is about process: how the council went about the thing, not whether the outcome was right.

Things the Ombudsman can look at:

• failure to notify neighbours where the council's own procedures required it
• a factual error in an officer report that misled the decision maker
• failure to take account of a material consideration through administrative oversight
• misleading or incorrect advice given in writing
• unreasonable delay, including delay in dealing with an enforcement complaint
• failure to follow the council's own enforcement, complaints or consultation procedures
• failure to consult a body the council was required to consult

Things it cannot look at. The planning merits of a decision taken without fault. The weight a planning committee attached to a consideration. A disagreement with an officer's professional judgement. And a matter where you had a right of appeal or a remedy in court, unless it was not reasonable to expect you to use it.

That last restriction is the one that catches applicants. If your application was refused, your remedy is an appeal to the Planning Inspectorate, so the Ombudsman will not investigate the refusal.

Exhausting the council's own complaints process

The Ombudsman normally expects the council to have had a proper chance to put things right. In practice that means going through the council's corporate complaints procedure, usually two stages, and getting a final response.

Do it in writing and keep it tight. State what happened, what the council's own policy or procedure said should have happened, what the gap is, and what injustice it caused you. A complaint that reads as a general grievance about the planning department will get a general answer.

Keep the correspondence. The Ombudsman will ask for the council's file, and your own dated record of what you were told and when is what turns a contested account into a documented one.

Note: a complaint about a councillor's conduct is a different route, going to the council's monitoring officer, and a complaint about refused information goes to the information regulator rather than the Ombudsman.

Maladministration against disagreement with a decision

Here is the test that separates them. Ask what the council did wrong procedurally, and then ask whether the outcome might have been different if it had done that thing correctly.

If you cannot name a procedural failing, you have a disagreement with a decision, and the Ombudsman is not the forum. If you can name one but the outcome would have been the same anyway, the Ombudsman may find fault but conclude there was no injustice, which is a finding without a remedy.

The complaints that succeed tend to combine both. The council failed to send the neighbour notification letter its own procedure required, you therefore did not object, and your objection would have raised a matter the officer report did not address. That is a procedural failing with a plausible causal link to the outcome.

Evidence that supports a complaint

Documents, not adjectives. The Ombudsman is weighing the council's conduct against the standard the council set itself, so the council's own documents are the strongest material you have.

Assemble the planning application reference and the decision notice, the officer report, the council's published procedures on neighbour notification and on complaints, the site notice photographs with dates if you have them, your correspondence with the council in date order, and the relevant pages of the adopted local plan or supplementary guidance the council was applying. Where money is involved, the council's published statements can be relevant, and infrastructure funding statements show what was collected and spent.

For enforcement complaints, the council's own enforcement policy is the key document, because the Ombudsman will measure the council's handling against its own stated priorities and timescales rather than against your expectations. The way those priorities work is set out in council enforcement priorities and how complaints work.

Remedies available

The remedies are real but modest, and they are about your injustice rather than about the development.

An apology, usually in a form the Ombudsman specifies. A financial payment, typically for distress, or for time and trouble where the council's handling of the complaint itself was poor. A recommendation that the council change a procedure or train its staff, which is often the most useful outcome for everyone who comes after you. And occasionally a payment reflecting a loss where the Ombudsman concludes the outcome would probably have been different.

What you will not get is revocation of a planning permission, demolition of the thing that was built, or compensation calculated on the loss of value to your property. The Ombudsman has no power to order any of those. Decisions are published in anonymised form, which has its own value if your aim is to change how the council behaves.

Timescales

Complain within 12 months of becoming aware of the problem. The Ombudsman has discretion to accept a late complaint but will want a reason.

Expect a two stage process: an initial assessment of whether the complaint is within jurisdiction and worth investigating, then a formal investigation if it proceeds. Investigations take months rather than weeks, and the Ombudsman will usually invite the council to comment and may propose a settlement before issuing a decision.

Meanwhile, if the development you are concerned about is being built, the Ombudsman process will not stop it. That is a practical reason to deal with the planning route first and the complaint afterwards.

Where judicial review is the only route

If what you want is the decision itself quashed, the Ombudsman cannot help and the court can. Judicial review of a planning decision has to be brought promptly and within a short statutory period measured in weeks, and a statutory challenge to a planning appeal decision under section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 has its own equally short deadline.

Those deadlines are the reason to take legal advice immediately rather than after the complaints process. Running the council's two stage complaints procedure first will take you past the window in most cases, and the court will not extend it because you were being reasonable.

Illustrative example. A householder discovers a two storey extension next door after the scaffolding goes up, having received no notification, and the council's own procedure required a letter to adjoining occupiers. The permission stands. An Ombudsman complaint may produce an apology, a payment for the injustice of losing the chance to object, and a change to the council's notification practice. A judicial review, brought within the statutory window, is the only route that could have touched the permission itself.

For an applicant whose own application has been refused, the more productive route is almost always a well evidenced appeal, supported by a Planning Statement that engages with each reason for refusal. PlanScope drafts one from your project answers and flags where site facts are missing. This is general guidance, not legal advice; take advice from a qualified professional on any court deadline before relying on it.

PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.