Planning committee site visits and how they work

A planning committee site visit is a fact-finding exercise, not a hearing. Members go to the site, look at it, ask officers factual questions and go away again. No decision is taken, nobody speaks for or against the application, and anything a member learns has to be brought back into the public meeting so that it forms part of the committee's consideration in the open. Whether a visit happens at all is governed by the council's own constitution and committee procedure rules rather than by statute, which is why practice varies so much between authorities.

If you want one to happen, that last point is the one to work with. There is no right to a site visit anywhere in planning law.

Who decides that a site visit happens

Four routes are common, and the council's constitution will set out which it uses.

The officer recommends one in the report, usually where levels, inter-visibility or the relationship between buildings cannot be understood from drawings. The chair of the committee decides one is needed, often after reading the objections. A ward member requests one, which many authorities treat as effectively decisive. Or the committee itself resolves at the meeting to defer the application for a site visit, which is the most disruptive route because it pushes determination into the following cycle.

Some authorities run visits as a matter of course for every major application. Others hold them only for applications where the officer recommendation and the likely committee view diverge. A few have moved away from visits altogether in favour of video and drone footage presented at the meeting.

Where the committee defers for a visit, the determination period slips by at least one cycle, which usually means four to six weeks. On a major application already close to the thirteen week deadline, that normally requires an agreed extension of time rather than a refusal on timing.

Formal committee visits and how they run

A formal visit is organised by officers. Members are given a schedule, travel together where the authority provides transport, and are accompanied by the case officer and sometimes by legal or democratic services staff.

The format is deliberately dry. The case officer identifies the site, points out the boundaries, the position of the proposed building and the relationship to neighbours, and answers questions of fact. Members walk the site where access has been agreed with the owner, or view it from public land where it has not. Plans are carried and compared with what is on the ground.

What does not happen is debate. Members are usually asked not to express views, and officers will stop a discussion that drifts into the merits. That restraint is not politeness. It protects the decision from a later challenge that the committee made up its mind outside the meeting.

Access is a practical constraint people underestimate. The applicant is not obliged to let the committee onto the land, and where access is refused the visit happens from the highway and from any neighbouring property that offers it. Where the issue is overlooking or overshadowing, the view that matters is often from the objector's garden, and an objector who offers access gives members something they will otherwise never see. The measurable part of that question belongs in an Overshadowing Study in any event, because a visit tells members how a space feels and not how many hours of sun it loses.

Individual member visits

Members also visit sites on their own, and this is where most of the procedural trouble arises.

The rules are usually set out in the member code of conduct and the local protocol on planning. A member visiting alone should stay on public land unless the owner has given consent, should not accept hospitality, should not enter into discussion of the merits with the applicant, agent or objectors, and should not give any indication of how they intend to vote.

The reason is fairness. If a member hears one side's account on site and the other side never gets to answer it, the committee's decision is exposed. The expected response is for the member to declare at the meeting that they visited and to repeat, in public, anything of substance they were told.

A member who finds themselves lobbied on a doorstep during a visit should say that they cannot discuss it and refer the person to the case officer. Objectors who corner a councillor on site often do their own case harm.

What members may and may not discuss

The distinction officers draw is between familiarisation and representation.

Familiarisation is looking: ground levels, the height of the existing building, the distance to the nearest window, whether a hedge screens anything, how the access sits on the bend, what the street looks like. Questions of fact to officers are fine and expected.

Representation is argument: whether the design is acceptable, whether the objections are well founded, whether the officer's recommendation is right. That belongs in the committee room where everyone can hear it and respond.

The line gets blurred most often on heritage and landscape applications, where the judgement really is visual and members are being asked to form an impression. Even there, the impression should be formed and then stated at the meeting, with reasons, rather than agreed among members in a car park. Where the effect is on a wider setting, the assessment itself sits in a Townscape and Visual Impact Assessment with agreed viewpoints, and a visit to one of those viewpoints is far more useful than a general wander.

Whether the public can attend

Usually not as a right. A site visit is generally treated as an informal gathering rather than a meeting of the committee, so the public access provisions that apply to formal council meetings under the Local Government Act 1972 do not bite in the same way.

Practice then varies. Some authorities publish the time of the visit and allow applicants, agents and objectors to be present as silent observers. Some restrict attendance to members and officers. Some allow the applicant on site because access depends on their consent, which creates an obvious imbalance that good authorities manage by inviting objectors to the same visit.

If you want to know, ask the democratic services team rather than the case officer, and ask in writing. Where you are permitted to attend, attend and say nothing. An objector who stays quiet and hands the chair a single annotated photograph at the end has done better than one who delivers a speech.

Anyone can of course stand on the public highway.

How the visit is reported back

The report-back is the part that matters legally and the part most often thin.

At the meeting, the chair should record which members attended the visit. Members who attended should state anything they learned that is not in the officer's report, and officers should confirm the factual position. Where new material has come to light, for example that a boundary fence has already been removed or that a tree shown on the plan no longer exists, that needs to be put to the applicant and the objectors before the vote.

Members who did not attend the visit are entitled to vote. There is no rule preventing it, though some authorities have local conventions discouraging it, and a member who has not seen a site where the visual relationship is the whole issue should think about whether they are in a position to decide.

Where the authority used video or drone footage instead of a visit, the footage should be published with the agenda so that everyone, including objectors, has seen what the members have seen. Footage shown for the first time in the meeting is a procedural weakness.

Predetermination, bias and declared interests

Three separate concepts, frequently conflated.

Predisposition is lawful. A councillor elected on a platform of resisting development on a particular field is allowed to hold that view. Section 25 of the Localism Act 2011 confirms that a member is not to be taken to have had a closed mind merely because they previously did or said something indicating a view on the matter, which gives members room to campaign and to comment.

Predetermination is unlawful. It means approaching the decision with a closed mind, incapable of being persuaded by the officer's report, the representations or the debate. The practical test is whether the member remained open to the arguments at the point of voting.

Interests are different again. Disclosable pecuniary interests under the Localism Act 2011 must be registered and declared, and a member with one cannot participate. Other interests are governed by the authority's own code. A member who owns land next to the application site has a problem that no amount of care on a site visit will cure.

Lobbying during a visit is the behaviour most likely to generate a complaint, and complaints go to the monitoring officer rather than to the planning department.

Asking for a visit

Write before the agenda is published, not after. Once an application is on the agenda it is usually too late for anything short of a committee deferral.

Address the request to the case officer and copy the chair of the planning committee and your ward councillors. Then make the case in three sentences:

1. Identify the specific physical thing that cannot be understood from the submitted drawings and photographs: a change in level across the boundary, the actual height of an existing hedge, the sight line at an access on a bend, the distance between facing windows.
2. Say why it is material to the decision, linking it to a policy test rather than to inconvenience.
3. Offer access from your own property if the relationship from that side is the point.

Parish and town councils carry more weight here than individuals, so route the request through yours if there is one. While you are there, check whether a neighbourhood plan covers the site, because a made plan gives the parish a policy basis for the request rather than a general concern.

Keep it short. A one-page request with an annotated site photograph gets read. A twelve-page objection with the request on page nine does not.

This is general guidance rather than legal advice, so check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. If you are the applicant and the committee is visiting, make sure the documents in the pack match what is on the ground, and browse the 66 report types if a technical assessment is what the argument actually turns on.

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