Welcome to Part Two of OnTheWight’s two-hour conversation with Ollie Boulter, the strategic manager for Planning and Infrastructure Delivery at the Isle of Wight council.
In this episode we find out more about pre-application advice, what life as a planning officer is like on the Island and how they manage to stay on top of so many different planning applications, as well as Ollie summarising the national and local planning strategy.
The pre-application process
There is often a misconception about pre-application advice being offered to individuals and developers, so we asked Ollie to go into more detail about what the service is and how the process works.
He starts by making the point that it is not about the officers giving potential applicants ideas, but guiding them in terms of what would or wouldn’t be acceptable within planning guidelines or standards.
The importance of pre-application advice is to identify potential issues early and improving applications, making them less likely to be refused.
Discretionary timescales
Ollie’s department believes that pre-application service is a useful and valuable tool for applicants and have some self-imposed timescales on how quickly they respond.
As mentioned before minor or small scale planning applications have to be decided upon within eight weeks, but pre-planning advice is usually targeted within a matter of days, rather than weeks.
The applicant also benefits from the continuity of the same officer who gave pre-planning advice, also being the officer who determines the full planning application.
The corporate memory of an elephant
Ollie was full of praise for his team of 13-14 planning officers who manage the whopping 1,600 applications each year. The accumulated experience and knowledge of his team provides the value of the corporate memory of an elephant. He added,
“It’s entirely remarkable and we are very lucky to have the people that we do, doing this job.
“It never ceases to amaze me how I am able to shout across the office, ‘do you know anything about …’ and they are on it straight away.”
With members of the planning department living on the Island or having grown up on the Island has meant that not only does the department have a highly knowledgeable and professional workforce, but they are also highly invested.
Understanding local and national planning frameworks
We asked Ollie if he could summarise what’s changed nationally and what’s changed locally with Island planning.
He explains that so much of the local and national issues are interconnected which is why it’s important to understand both. There were changes made to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) in December 2023, which had implications for local planning, but we’ve just seen another set of changes in December 2024, due to the new Government.
So as you can imagine, there are significant challenges aligning local planning policies with the NPPF, especially with frequent changes to national policy.
Listen to the conversation
As mentioned before, we’ve split the two-hour conversation into several parts to make it easier for you to digest.
You can listen to the Part Two by clicking on the play button below. Using this player, you can also pause the recording, jump back 10 seconds or jump forward 30 seconds.
Listen to Part One. Part Three follows tomorrow.
