Evidential Sufficiency Failures in Planning Complaints (Stage 1 and Stage 2)
Abstract
This paper documents the interaction between a decision-stage evidential reconstruction of a local authority planning determination and the subsequent operation of the internal planning complaints process. It explains why certain categories of planning-related evidential findings are effectively unanswerable within internal governance mechanisms, and why escalation to an external ombudsman becomes procedurally inevitable.
The analysis is anonymised and does not assess planning merits or development outcomes. It examines what occurs when decision-stage evidential sufficiency in the planning system is tested explicitly rather than presumed.
1. Introduction: Presumption Versus Reconstruction
Planning decisions rely on complex, distributed evidence assembled over time. In routine determinations, the evidential record is rarely reconstructed explicitly at the moment of decision. Instead, sufficiency is often presumed, particularly where scrutiny is low and contestation limited.
Decision-stage evidential reconstruction replaces presumption with verification. It fixes the moment of determination as an analytical boundary and asks a narrower, factual question: what evidence demonstrably existed at the moment the decision was taken, and was that evidence sufficient to support reliance on material considerations at that time?
2. The Decision-Stage Reconstruction
The determination examined here was reconstructed using a structured framework designed to assess evidential sufficiency at decision stage. The reconstruction identified a consistent structural condition across multiple topic areas:
- material considerations were relied upon at determination;
- decision-grade evidence did not exist in completed form at that time; and
- reliance was placed on indicative material, future assessment, and assumed resolution through conditions or later stages.
The findings do not assert that the decision was substantively wrong. They demonstrate that the decision cannot be reconstructed as evidentially complete at the point it was taken.
3. Why These Findings Create a Governance Problem
Decision-stage evidential findings of this type are difficult to address within ordinary internal processes. To answer them, an authority must typically be able to do one of three things:
- Demonstrate decision-grade evidence existed at determination. Where reconstruction shows it did not, this route is unavailable.
- Demonstrate lawful deferral. This requires a legal or policy basis for deferral, and evidence at decision stage justifying reliance on deferral.
- Reframe the issue as planning judgment or outcome disagreement. This avoids rather than answers an existence-based reconstruction test.
These are structural constraints. The issue raised is evidential and temporal, while internal processes are commonly oriented toward service failure or disagreement rather than reconstruction of evidential states.
4. The Complaint Process in Practice
The findings were raised through a published two-stage complaints process. What followed was straightforward:
- Stage 1: no response.
- Stage 2: no response.
- Senior internal assurance functions were directly notified.
- No intervention occurred and no procedural correction followed.
Failure to respond at one stage can be characterised as delay. Failure to respond at both stages indicates non-operation of the complaints system itself.
5. Why Non-Response Is Not Neutral
Once failure is visible and persists, silence is not neutral. Two linked failures are now present:
- Control failure: the complaints mechanism did not operate.
- Assurance failure: visibility existed at senior assurance level, yet the failure was not corrected or escalated.
This transforms the issue from a case-specific dispute into a systemic governance condition. The internal system has demonstrated that it cannot provide a remedy for this category of issue.
6. Why the Complaint Is Effectively Unanswerable Internally
The complaint does not ask whether a decision was reasonable or defensible in outcome. It asks what evidence existed at the decision moment and whether that evidential state can be reconstructed. That question has factual answers only.
Where the answer is “the evidence did not yet exist”, internal resolution becomes structurally impossible: acknowledging it creates governance exposure; denying it requires evidence that does not exist; reframing avoids the question rather than answering it.
7. Why Escalation Becomes Inevitable
External escalation is procedural when the internal process fails to operate, no internal remedy remains available, and the failure persists despite senior visibility. External oversight exists precisely for situations where internal mechanisms cannot resolve a governance-level issue without self-contradiction.
At that point, escalation is not a choice. It is the completion of the governance loop.
8. Broader Implications
This interaction illustrates a wider, repeatable pattern: decision-stage evidential insufficiency is common; internal review processes are not designed to test it explicitly; when it is tested, internal resolution often becomes impossible; escalation follows from structural limitation rather than disagreement.
9. Conclusion
This paper demonstrates that some governance issues cannot be answered internally — not because they are invalid, but because they are too precise. When evidential sufficiency is tested at the decision stage rather than assumed, silence becomes a form of acknowledgement and escalation becomes procedurally inevitable.
The system responds — just later, and externally, rather than early and internally.
Method Note
This analysis was produced using a structured decision-stage evidential reconstruction framework (PGAT), designed to assess evidential sufficiency at the point of determination rather than retrospectively.