Strange title I hear you say. What on earth is RAMPS and what's it got to do with water tower wood?
RAMPS is a Community invention that was born out of the irritation of constantly checking for changes to planning applications on the Midlothian Planning Portal.
Why am I interested?
Regular readers of this blog site in the past will have noticed that my personal involvement in Planning arose from applications made by self (and architect hubby), applications made by a neighbouring tennis club, and applications impacting the community in Midlothian.
Experience from these various forays into Planning made me curious, and being a system controller at one time, made me look very closely at the system.
So what happened?
There's nothing like experience, is there? I became very adept at querying the planning portal after an application by myself was refused and then approved by the DPEA. The shenanigans..... not by the DPEA per se, but by the community and the planners. Brown envelopes maybe, or a large development impacting the Countryside? Nope. A sitting out area in a Woodland. Brown envelopes? Only from a visitor to the appeal site who fancied passing on "something" to the Reporter. In a Brown Envelope.
So I learned a lot from a single contentious planning application. Joined the Community Council and was appointed as their Planning Representative. Fascinating stuff. Learning so much about impactful planning issues, listening to community concerns, and also joining the Federation of Community Councils.
Better than being Planning Rep though, I met Bill Kerr-Smith.😊
Now Bill and I were pretty dedicated to our local community council. No, we were very dedicated.
Whilst battling with Community Council planning applications for Midlothian, the fastest growing local authority in the whole of Scotland, our neighbours the Dalkeith Lawn Tennis Club erected some screen mesh on their metal ball proof fencing without planning permission. It might not have been a problem except it became 3 layers thick. Overshadowing my precious garden and the window to our bedroom, we couldn't sit back and do nothing. Attempts at mediation in the manner of a High Hedge application (which I thought could be considered similar in planning terms) brought nothing. We raised a complaint and the club applied for retrospective planning permission.
Its pretty well documented on this blog site already.
For anyone interested in the detail the blog posts are;
Diary of Planning Events
Part 1 Nov 23rd 2015
Part 2 Dec 13 2015
Part 3 Feb 11 2018.
The Tennis Club Application.
The application (17/00747) was one of those that when it goes wrong, it keeps going wrong. Firstly it didn't get published on the weekly list sent out to the Community Council. It was fortunate I was able to check that. This omission caused the application to be extended by a month. A lot can then happen in a month. I was checking the portal documents and scratching my head. Numbers of documents on the portal didn't tally with changes appearing. I wondered if documents were being deleted. Turns out documents can be deleted, and updated before being put back on the system. Think about that. Then there's backdating. A document that is back dated and later uploaded, is buried in the date order on the portal. If one is deleted and a new one comes on the portal back dated, you wouldn't know because the total number of documents would remain the same.
For this tennis club application this was the key observation by myself that formed the basis of part of a planning complaint.
Changes on the portal to documents. The portal document previously described as “correspondence” was changed to “Supporting Statement” and dated Dec 22nd. Hence it was not reviewed as a supporting statement when we made our initial objection and it makes a substantial difference to the appreciation of what the application proposes.
This was the change that made a whole lot of difference to what the planning officer was able to implement post decision. The decision, which was for approval with conditions, protected our light by approval for a single layer of light green netting with it's removal out of playing season. Yet 3 layers of netting remained with the apparent agreement of the Council. Not good.
We took our complaint all the way to the Ombudsman. Here is the decision report if you wish to read it.
The Ombudsman upheld this complaint. The outcome was an apology from the Council (https://watertowerwood.blogspot.com/2020/)
and a learning session required to be held at the Council. Fortunately good relations with the tennis club meant that the netting layering issue was resolved and the Council still have the option to re visit should that ever be necessary. At the heart of all of this however, was the change of status of that document. From "Correspondence" to "Support Statement"on the Portal.
Jeezo it was complicated.
I often struggled to explain it in lay terms.
I was explaining it to a neighbour, Grant Mackay, an IT expert. Oh joy of joys....... 😊
What an IT Expert Can Do
I explained my observations to Grant. He completely understood. Grant, Bill and myself were engaged with other local applications where we wondered if changes on the portal were helping developers or planners to gain an advantage over community concerns.
There was no time wasted. Grant set up the means to electronically "scrape" the Midlothian Planning Portal every evening for changes to planning applications between days. A neat little email link took me to a report where each and every new application, and every application which had changes to it, were listed. If I had had this during 17/00747 my life would have been a whole lot easier.
And so RAMPS was born. Grant can give you exact dates and all that techno speak that I don't understand. I was more than happy to provide feedback and use the reports. Bill and I presented RAMPS at the Federation of Community Councils and also at a Community Event in Dalkeith Library. We gained some interested parties.
I met Clare from Planning Democracy 😊, and others. Actually I had met Clare before. One time I remember in Penicuik, when I had to run out to put £s in the parking meter. Clare had been presenting issues arising with planning applications and I was sitting thinking about work and root cause analysis. I didn't want to lose my chance to say something before running off to the car park. I distinctly remember my RCA was something like "there is something going on in the background that is being hidden and when the time comes, the cards that are played disadvantage the community". Now this was well before our neighbours application and RAMPS. But that was my thought at the time.
Since RAMPS has been available I have had an opportunity to discuss an tree application with the Council. In chatting this over I mentioned that I had access to a tool that provided the daily changes on the portal. "Oh we know about that, Susan" was the reply.
I think RAMPS has rattled the operators of the system. I never see documents that change status these days. Since Covid with all the extended time frames and wfh, I notice lots of objections to planning applications get uploaded on a Sunday. No other documents get uploaded on a Sunday. Tree applications sometimes disappear. Then they re appear. Works to Trees (WTTs) are a notification only and I sometimes wonder why LAs give themselves the grief of putting them on the Planning Portal at all.
So when someone asks me why I got involved in RAMPS, well I kinda provided the reason to make it happen I suppose. Now I'm just plain nosey. But out there in the wide world of Planning, there must be so many people who could benefit from being able to track daily changes to a planning application in their area.
What a web site Grant has created. It's phenomenal.
Enjoy.
