Planning applications – the good news
By Barnaby Usborne
All planning applications can now be viewed on line by anyone – if you have the skill and technology that is. www.chiltern.gov.uk will take you to the District Council website. From there you can navigate through ‘planning’, ‘view planning applications’ and ‘application search’ to find the details you might be interested in.
It helps to have the application number, but if not, you can get there with a little more work. For each application you can find the drawings and documents sent in by the applicant as well as the comments made by neighbours.
However… the bad news is that the most important information for neighbours may not be on the drawings. If you want to know how high the building is going to be or how close to your boundary it is, you may be disappointed. The drawing will have a scale – 1:50 or 1:200 or whatever – but this becomes meaningless on your computer screen.
Applicants are not obliged to show a scale bar or give the vital dimensions on their drawings. And the Parish Council no longer receives a copy of the original drawings as they used to.
So you have to guess.