Racecourse hotel not local favourite

Anyone or any business living in Warwick District wishing to develop, add to or modify their properties, are obliged to submit detailed plans and fee to the much overworked and beleaguered district council planning department. The application will eventually be considered by a planning officer, who will either accept or reject the application based on its conformity with existing planning regulations and recommendations.

Neighbours, local residents or anyone objecting to a planning application, can register this with the planning department. If there are five or more objections, the application must go before the district council planning committee made up of at least five elected district councillors, This committee, independent of the planning department and which meets in public, may pass or reject the application.

Thus up to now a reasonably democratic procedure, it is however not the end for a refused application, the applicant may appeal to a Central Government Appeals Office based in Bristol.

An appeals’ inspector will then independently consider the application and can overturn a local planning refusal, allowing the application to go ahead. There is no further appeal against this final decision - perhaps not so democratic.

If the Racecourse Hotel planning application manages the local heavy going, but does not clear Warwick’s planning hurdles, it might well go to appeal. Now a Government Appeals Office may well be influenced by the prevailing Government. If as Disraeli is said to have remarked, the Church of England is the Tory Party at prayer, one might well imagine that the Jockey Club of Great Britain is the Tory Party at the races, which might just help the Racecourse Hotel limp past the winning Post, but surely not as a local favourite. - Richard Warner, Cocksparrow St, Warwick.