Re: This seems like a real legal loophole
Only a few applications go to planning committee - most are decided on by officers using delegated powers.
8 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2019
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
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.