Approving development without being bribed?
I'm not surprised the councillors are upset, it sets a dangerous precedent.
Council culture: Software test leads to absurd local planning SNAFU
A borough council in the English county of Kent is fuming after a software test on the council's website led to five nonsensical dummy planning application documents being mistakenly published as legally binding decisions. According to a statement from Swale Borough Council, staff from the Mid Kent Planning Support Team had …
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Wednesday 8th September 2021 17:34 GMT Little Mouse
Re: Approving development without being bribed?
I was going to post something about IT staff being cheaper to bribe, but of course in reality your typical IT custodian actually has a good measure of genuine integrity, unlike a number of Councillors that I allegedly may or may not have had the pleasure of working under.
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Wednesday 8th September 2021 16:58 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
this process could cost the council £8,000 in taxpayer funds.
So a single click can approve them, but to unapprove them
“.... without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters"
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Thursday 9th September 2021 12:23 GMT heyrick
Re: this process could cost the council £8,000 in taxpayer funds.
"So a single click can approve them"
Indeed. It is beyond belief that these are considered legally binding just because they got stuck on a website, rather than actually signed in ink by a human. Seems like a cost-cutting abdication of responsibility.
Also means if a miscreant wants to cause untold havoc, simply hack into a local council website (given what I've seen of local councils, start with admin/admin) and approve everything, which will instantly become a binding legal document due to <batshit crazy excuse>...
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Thursday 9th September 2021 18:51 GMT Diogenes8080
Re: this process could cost the council £8,000 in taxpayer funds.
So the council received legal advice that a legal advisor would need to charge £8k of legal fees to reverse the inadvertent publication of test data. Unless the maligned system automatically poked records into other systems, I suspect that the council received advice from a local outside body.
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Wednesday 8th September 2021 17:43 GMT Doctor Syntax
"These errors will have to be rectified"
Which is nonsense. As the article points out, if they're acted on first there'll be no means to reverse them.
If the council has some means of imposing a hold whilst the JR takes place then there'll likely be civil action torecover the cost of the delay and £8k might only be the advance payment.
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Wednesday 8th September 2021 18:40 GMT Mage
Not absolutely no means.
There was a big pub demolished by a developer illegally. The court made them rebuild exactly as it had been. Which would certainly have been horrendously expensive compared to any modern build. A sort real life "Batteries Not Included" without magic aliens.
Of course a favourite ploy is to secretly damage the roof, have inadequate security on the empty property and a few years later a Council will condemn the listed building.
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Wednesday 8th September 2021 21:13 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Not absolutely no means.
We hadn a similar situation. I used to live not far away from Late Bronze Age/Iron Age hill fort, later converted to a Normal motte and bailey castle. It had an Arts and Crafts period stone-built pub built inside it which was a nice enough building although it would almost certainly never have had planning permission. I'm not sure if it was listed with the rest of the site although I think it would have been worth it.
The owners got permission to extend the pub which required a certain amount of demolition. They demolished more than the permission allowed and were starting on a larger extension than allowed (which in turn would have broken extra ground within the scheduled monument). I think they would have been made to reinstate the excess demolition in the original materials. However they had, shall we say, failed to retain the (no doubt quite valuable stone on site. Oddly enough nobody knew where it had gone. So as they couldn't restore it they were ordered to demolish the remainder and grass over the site.
I believe they keep applying to rebuild. I'm not sure what the situation is now but occasionally there are murmurings of sympathy for them - frankly if it had been my decision they wouldn't have got the original extension position and I think the outcome is exactly right to set an example to anyone else who decides to mess with scheduled monuments.
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Thursday 9th September 2021 12:02 GMT Ian Johnston
Re: Not absolutely no means.
Of course a favourite ploy is to secretly damage the roof, have inadequate security on the empty property and a few years later a Council will condemn the listed building.
In Glasgow - my home town - it's traditional for interesting buildings on valuable sites to "go on fire".
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Wednesday 8th September 2021 18:53 GMT PublicSectorNumpty
I think I know exactly how this happened as we have the same software.
Whilst there is a TEST and LIVE main system - well two, one back office, one public facing. there may be only one Document Management System (DMS) for various reasons, one simply the space required to duplicate would be huge - ours are measured in Terabytes now - whilst not sure that this would be the case here, it is possible.
So, the person was probably testing the decision notice process on the internal TEST system - all well and good - but the documents got published to the LIVE DMS - a bad thing.
We are ultra paranoid around this area and would never use a real application, even a real application on the test system - we always invent new ones - which is why my house has applications for nuclear power stations, incinerators etc on it.
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Wednesday 8th September 2021 20:03 GMT DS999
This seems like a real legal loophole
If something is considered "legally binding" simply by virtue of being published without regard to actual approval being granted by responsible parties!
Exactly what is (or was, if they fix the processes) to stop someone with access to the system from making whatever changes they wanted? Perhaps in response to bribes, or perhaps to get revenge on an ex wife by changing the land use of her new address to be used for waste disposal and then having people show up dumping garbage there. Even if it was later fixed, a judge might say "can't arrest people for dumping garage because it was not illegal at the time they did it" leaving the poor ex wife responsible for cleanup costs.
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Wednesday 8th September 2021 20:49 GMT Jon 37
Re: This seems like a real legal loophole
You can't dump garbage at a waste disposal site without permission from the landowner, who will probably charge you. So granting planning permission for your enemies property doesn't actually cause them any problems.
Though if you owned the adjoining land I guess you could grant yourself permission to farm pigs there, or something equally noxious.
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Thursday 9th September 2021 08:06 GMT PerlyKing
Re: This seems like a real legal loophole
As I recall, Amazon (et al.) learned this the hard way. In the first implementation the price displayed was binding, but after a few pricing errors they changed the terms and conditions so that when you click the "buy" button you're making them an offer which they can refuse, or some such legal mumbo-jumbo.
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Thursday 9th September 2021 08:50 GMT IHateWearingATie
Re: This seems like a real legal loophole
I seem to remember from my dim and distant contract law lectures that the original case law on this is from the late 1800s and relates to a price being wrong on a watch in the shop window.
Invitation to treat, offer, acceptance I think are the three stages. Prices on a website are generally held in the T&Cs to be an invitation to treat.
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Thursday 9th September 2021 09:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: This seems like a real legal loophole
> This seems like a real legal loophole
It's not a legal loophole it's moronic stupidity on behalf of the council's lawyers. The due process for approving a planning application is that it goes before the planning committee and they vote on a motion to approve or a counter motion to reject. If it hasn't gone before the Committee it's not approved (nor rejected) - simple as that.
For the lawyer to say otherwise is curious. For the lawyer to say that any council employee mistakenly sticking something on the council website, planning section or otherwise, binds the council in any way shape or form is ludicrous. Mistakes are mistakes.
(This is not to say that the council doesn't bear some responsibility for costs reasonably incurred e.g. a developer may engage contractors and then have to pay a penalty to "un-engage" them, but as soon as the developer is informed of the mistake they will be in breach of planning law if they continue.)
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Thursday 9th September 2021 10:05 GMT Terry 6
Re: This seems like a real legal loophole
If it hasn't gone before the Committee it's not approved (nor rejected) - simple as that.
This was my original thought. Since when was the random action by an unauthorised employee legally binding. In the council case the published permission announcement is simply information that the due process has been carried out. It don't make it so if it hasn't been.
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Thursday 9th September 2021 10:31 GMT Loyal Commenter
Re: This seems like a real legal loophole
It sounds to me like that planning committee have offloaded the work of actually checking and approving applications to the users of the back-end IT system and are then just rubber-stamping the decisions.
IANAL, but I would have thought that legally the responsibility for that decision still rests with the one wielding the rubber stamp. This smells of typical corner-cutting of a local council under pressure from central government to make excessive cost savings.
More fool them if they don't read what they're signing though.
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Thursday 9th September 2021 12:16 GMT Androgynous Cupboard
Re: This seems like a real legal loophole
The point is if someone saw the decision and acted on it, then it was pulled as a clerical error, the council could (and would) be sued. It opens them to legal peril, so it's binding alright. Judicial review seems like a slightly oversize hammer to revert it, but that's lawyers for you.
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Thursday 9th September 2021 13:19 GMT hoola
Re: This seems like a real legal loophole
It does not work like that in Planning. The Decision Notice is the legal document that approves or rejects the planning application. A committee or single planning office may make the actual decision but it is the production and publication of the Decision Notice that is the legal part. This is an automated part of the system and many are now online in real time. When I was working on these systems back in the early 2000s, the D Notice was electronic PDF then uploaded to a separate web portal. Now the entire thing is in a single system start to finish so an incorrect D Notice is immediately published and a copy sent to the applicants.
The publication of that notice means that all due process has been completed and the applicant now has consent to start the work.
Now clearly in this case someone has erroneously used a live system to do some testing. The very fact that the Decision Notices contained humorous anecdotes would I assume make it easy to retract them. Whatever happens, the retraction is a legal process.
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Friday 10th September 2021 09:46 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: This seems like a real legal loophole
The PDFs in the article are of notices sent to the applicants with the relevant official's signature on them. From the point of view of the recipient of an apparently official notice it should be assumed that it won't be rescinded as a mistake at some future date. The incorporation of nonsense in an official notice isn't a reliable indicator that it wasn't meant.
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Wednesday 8th September 2021 20:32 GMT Eclectic Man
Security
How is it that a system publishing legally biding council responses was not strictly account managed and protected with (at least) passwords, and, hopefully two factor authentication and a mandatory check for authorisation?
Everything that is published on an official web site that is legally binding should be validated by a second person before publication, or at the very least only be accessible to someone with the appropriate authority and responsibility.
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Wednesday 8th September 2021 22:30 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Security
It still doesn't prevent you having a manual process around it. Click on the relevant fields without completing the process, collect P45. I take your point from earlier that it's a piece of S/W with problems but that just makes manual authorisation more necessary.
It would appear that in this case someone has been given access without any warning as to the risks or without being told what, if anything, is the authorisation process,
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Thursday 9th September 2021 06:24 GMT Rich 11
Early doors
Back in the time before all-day opening, I turned up at my local pub just before 7pm to find a fight already in progress in the car park. The landlord and his son were unloading the car after a visit to the cash and carry (don't ask!) when one of the regulars insisted on grabbing a bottle from the boot and opening it there and then. The son hadn't even got the key in the door before his dad and the eternally-thirsty regular were trading punches.
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Thursday 9th September 2021 08:04 GMT TwistedPsycho
I wonder if the other side of the question should be; how have we got to a point where technical errors can be legally binding? If you order something from a retailer when they screw up the decimal point, or book a flight that's overbooked, Errors and Omissions are acceptable and reversible, why SHOULD a council be any different?
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Thursday 9th September 2021 08:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
my reading was that this is some jobsworth...
...was making the mistake, of not including him in a decision, out to be a disaster.
Council should have just deleted the erroneous publication and told anyone querying it to take them to court if they want. Since person who has been said to have made mistake was not the council's responsible official and hence did not have the remit to make contractual decisions or official publications for them.
Seen this sort of thing often where some pain is moved sideways and out "from" underfoot who retaliates by being even more pedantic and self important that before. When what was really needed was above sentence upto "from".
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Thursday 9th September 2021 08:40 GMT PublicSectorNumpty
Re: my reading was that this is some jobsworth...
Alas, within a day of the status changing anyone watching the application would have go an email alert and therefore the documents would be out there - not only that, but usually the dec notices would have been emailed to the contacts in the system - that is if the email addresses were filled in. If not it would have been printed and posted - I know some councils out-source this bit, so it may have gone straight to a third party for printing
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Thursday 9th September 2021 16:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: my reading was that this is some jobsworth...
@"Alas, within a day of the status....", email is notoriously easy to spoof hence why fax was the only electronic transfer format recognised by law for years.
Even after the horse has left the stall, you know who has been misinformed and typically where the wrong thing has been emailed or even posted, a follow up with a notice that previous communication was in error and can be ignored is normal practice.
I have seen this many times with CCed email accounts being visible to all of the recipient of an email which again is also a legal matter, same action for any third party printing, notice that there was a failure in the email system is normal enough, since they want your repeat business.
For example if your website was hacked and made to show this misinformation, would this be consider binding? of course not, if the same hack also started an internal process in error again it is common enough that people accept that there has been yet another failure/misuse of an automated system. any reasonable person would agree that this is too common to be considered binding and I would suggest a court would agree.
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Friday 10th September 2021 10:33 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: my reading was that this is some jobsworth...
It's not an erroneous CC, it's a legally binding notice. The fact that it's possible to send out such a notice in this way doesn't make it any less legally binding. If you look at the PDFs they have a facsimile of s signature on them.
It would be well for those permitting their signature to to be used in this way to consider the safeguards they require - perhaps documents should require their personal release. (I've worked on a system that not only send out such "signed" documents. I was a sub contractor to the sub contractor to one of the usual suspects to whom the entire operation had been contracted out. OTOH I don't think the "signed" documents in this case carried the same legal weight.)
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Thursday 9th September 2021 11:00 GMT Peter Galbavy
What might be interesting is how many approvals would have got through without due process and will not be reversed because they didn't have odd comments on them? Can they link - remember these are demonstrably incompetents - updates back to the junior fallguy/girl?
A bit like burying bad news.
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Thursday 9th September 2021 12:17 GMT prandeamus
Here's your lesson
"An investigation is underway to understand exactly what happened to ensure that lessons are learned and any necessary action in relation to the conduct of officers involved is taken," the council rumbled, ominously."
Don't allow IT staff, especially Juniors, access to live sites. If you must do so, for some unavoidable reason, don't. But if you must, train the IT staff.
That will be £10,000, but with a discount for swift payment within 30 days.
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Friday 10th September 2021 10:33 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Jeez.
They're official notices giving or withholding permission to do things which have large amounts of money depending on them. So much so that there are frequent casual allegations of corruption surrounding them - any thread dealing with local govt. here is apt to include a few - and I have memories of at leas one scandal that became national news. This is serious stuff. It's not somebody ordering a gross of boxes of paperclips instead of a box of a gross.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
