Ms Charlotte Sheridan:

This goes to the part of our submission where we spoke about quality decision-making and the collaborative approach in that. What we see as being very valuable is that there would be a proactive discussion with the local authority and that we would both be working with a view to achieving a high-quality development. We have suggested in our submission that engagement with the local authority can sometimes be quite challenging when in actual fact we should be working for a common purpose.

To get that kind of direction from the local authority can be helpful in developing planning applications. However, a robust and strong application is needed that has the level of quality to which we aspire. Therefore, the local authority itself must have a good awareness of the quality of the application. That is where we see it as very important and valuable to have input from other disciplines when the planner is making a decision. The planner is balancing all of those issues and will often rely on reports from the engineer or a conservation officer. We would push for decisions also to be informed by reports from the local authority's architect's department and, equally, that the planners have a clear vision at the outset of what they are trying to achieve. That is the important thing, that the application is doing that. Of course they need to follow up on those.