Cllr Tony Barber, Ivybridge Filham ward, South Hams Council, writes: At the risk of prolonging the correspondence regarding South Hams Council's planning procedures, I feel impelled to make some personal comments following recent letters. I have served as a member of the council for several years; two of these were as a member of the development management committee. The meetings of this committee are fully open to the public and there is an opportunity for a speaker against and a speaker for any application to address the committee. Recently, to this has been added a member of the relevant parish or town council. Planning applications, which often involve considerable pre-application discussions with officers, have to be advertised and a number of bodies have to be consulted and the town/ parish is also a statutory consultee. In addition, members of the public are able to write in formally objecting to or supporting an application. The results of consultations are made available to members and published on council's website. In the case of large-scale applications, a developer is likely to have engaged in public consultation itself and be able to show that it has done so. Planning applications that are large, controversial, raise issues in regard to development outside the local plan, raise issues of principle or other significant reasons are considered by the committee. Following presentation of a report to the committee by officers and the clarification of any issues by members, there are comments by speakers and the local councillor is invited to comment. Open discussion by committee members will then take place with, in due course, a decision to accept an application; accept with specific conditions; reject; or seek a site meeting. In the case of the latter, there will then be a report back to the next meeting and a decision. All decisions are taken within statutory guidelines, as well as in knowledge of the likelihood of the decision being challenged. My experience is that members of the committee do not come to snap decisions on the basis of personal whims and do question, often in depth, many issues, comments and recommendations and take their role most seriously. Decisions by the committee are not capricious or perverse but members may need to decide, on balance (sometimes very difficult), whether or not to reject an officer recommendation. If they do so then they will have to give reasons for this, reasons that will be defendable in a public inquiry. We may sometimes not like the decision that has been arrived at and, maybe, there are ways in which the process could be improved but that decision has been made in public with representatives of the residents – councillors and others – being involved. Some of your correspondents seem to think that the committee should always follow completely the recommendations of the planning officers. In which case, why bother to have elected representatives if they are not going to question and, maybe, occasionally, reject officer advice? Decisions could be made just by unelected officers and the democratic process could then be by-passed, presumably without the need for a planning committee. Possibly this could be faster and maybe cheaper but hardly democratic.