Our Local Plan Inspector, Mr Anthony Thickett, was efficient and to-the-point when he held his two examinations into our draft Local Plan. He eventually decided that, such was our council’s poor drafting, he would have to make many of its major decisions himself. He asked for more information and got a further 1,000 plus pages of evidence (some of it duplicated) in September 2015. He also got a promotion to Chief Planning Inspector for Wales – more work for him.
Our Local Plan examination is now itself dragging on, and well on its way to mirroring how long the Current draft Local Plan took (at least 7 years). The inspection process started way before in August 2013, when Mr Thickett threw out the first draft submitted by EDDC because Mr Thickett decided it contained 53 major amendments agreed by councillors on the Development Management Committee and Cabinet and ratified by full council AFTER public consultation that then required the public to be consulted yet again.
It was thrown out again in March 2014 for still having major flaws and being considered unsound by Mr Thickett. The 2015 hearing was also inconclusive.
Is it going to be thrown out again? Is it so controversial it will be a major headliner? Is it lost down the back of a sofa?
EDDC appears to be in no hurry to see it arrive. Developers continue to benefit from its unavailability. What’s the problem?
We appreciate that Mr Thickett is a very busy man (not least because of all the extra work EDDC has forced him to do) but surely this sorry saga has to end somehow and somewhere – even if it is (heaven forfend) back to its on-its-last-legs drawing board.
And, if it were to fail again, would this constitute misfeasance or malfeasance in office on the part of officers and councillors involved – a criminal offence?
East Devon Watch 
Unlikely to be a criminal offence unless it can be proven that this was a deliberate ploy to avoid a Local Plan being approved.
And of course, whilst developers get their lack-of-a-local-plan no-five-or-six-year-housing-land-supply east-as-much-as-you-can free-for-all period, EDDC benefits from the New Homes Bonus for each and every new home built, thus helping them to keep the council tax the same (i.e. a reduction in real terms).
Some of us feel that this is somewhat short-sighted, and that a slightly higher EDDC council tax (which is in any case only a minor part of the overall council tax) would be preferable to unconstrained development in our beautiful countryside.
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“Unlikely to be a criminal offence unless it can be proven that this was a deliberate ploy to avoid a Local Plan being approved.”
Quite. But misfeasance could take place if appropriate resources are not directed to a project when required urgently but given to much less urgent projects that do not need them.
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Possibly, but VERY difficult to prove and history suggests that the police might be even more reluctant to investigate that they have demonstrated in the past.
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