IF you are a Kirklees councillor and someone offers you a job on the planning committee, turn it down.
This is a classic heads you lose, tails you lose situation. You will be cursed and derided by everyone.
Even your mother will disown you.
At this rate, given their recent track record, poor old planning committee members will never make it into our good books.
They’re damned it they do and damned if they don’t.
Watch their eyes go wide when you tell them that the ‘26,000 new homes in Kirklees by 2028’ mantra is based on a discredited study.
Watch their eyes narrow when you tell them Green Belt land is sacred. Not to us, they seem to be saying. Oh, heaven help you if it’s so.
The Lindley Moor data centre and 300 homes plan got the go-ahead after Kirklees planning department advised councillors that the developers would probably drag the local authority through an expensive appeal procedure if they lost.
As if this were cause enough to over-ride every other legitimate reason to turn the application down.
The planning department got some stick over that.
But the councillors who passed it – by one vote – were unkindly described as Wet Nellies for being so under the planning department’s thumb.
On the other hand, the councillors on the sub-committee that has given the green light for two wind turbines on a Thurstonland farm were criticised for not listening to planning department advice.
In addition to which, a number of councillors on the planning committee have been accused of schadenfreude, of delighting in passing planning applications in nice green Nimby areas when they themselves come from semi-derelict areas in north Kirklees.
How unkind. And how untrue. Nobody would be that small-minded and mean, would they?
