Refund eligibility under Planning Guarantee Legislation
Case reference FOI2024/00604
Published 29 April 2024
Request
I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act in relation to your authority's policies and practices in providing refunds under the planning guarantee legislation (Regulation 9A of the Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications, Deemed Applications, Requests and Site Visits) (England) Regulations 2012) and more recent iterations.
1.
Please detail how the authority determine an applicant's eligibility for a refund in accordance with the legislation.
2.
Can you provide any official documentation, policies, or guidelines that outline the process and criteria for refund eligibility under the planning guarantee legislation? This would include any procedural steps that applicants must follow to initiate a refund request.
If the authority does not have any official documentation, policies or guidelines and has not sought to create this since the inception of the legislation can you provide an explanation why?
3.
Are there circumstances, such as the statute of limitations, under which refunds would not be provided? If so, what are these circumstances? Any supporting written advice from your legal department would be of interest.
4.
Has your authority been proactive in informing applicant's that they are due a refund of their planning application fees paid when they become eligible?
If the answer to 4 is no, could you explain the rationale behind this approach?
5.
Has your authority been proactive in refunding applicant's fees when they become eligible?
a)
If the answer to 5 is no, could you explain the rationale behind this approach?
b)
If refunds are not proactively made, can you advise what happens to the funds from the unclaimed refunds, since the legislation was implemented.
c)
Can you advise how much has the authority 'earned'/received in funds for planning applications from applicants that was due to be returned but has not been.
6.
Please provide the contact information for submitting refund requests i.e. the relevant person/team, contact telephone number and contact email address.
7.
Please provide the contact information for the authority's Monitoring Officer, as their oversight may be relevant to my inquiries.
Response
I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act in relation to your authority's policies and practices in providing refunds under the planning guarantee legislation (Regulation 9A of the Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications, Deemed Applications, Requests and Site Visits) (England) Regulations 2012) and more recent iterations.
1.
Please detail how the authority determine an applicant's eligibility for a refund in accordance with the legislation.
2.
Can you provide any official documentation, policies, or guidelines that outline the process and criteria for refund eligibility under the planning guarantee legislation? This would include any procedural steps that applicants must follow to initiate a refund request.
If the authority does not have any official documentation, policies or guidelines and has not sought to create this since the inception of the legislation can you provide an explanation why?
3.
Are there circumstances, such as the statute of limitations, under which refunds would not be provided? If so, what are these circumstances? Any supporting written advice from your legal department would be of interest.
4.
Has your authority been proactive in informing applicant's that they are due a refund of their planning application fees paid when they become eligible?
If the answer to 4 is no, could you explain the rationale behind this approach?
5.
Has your authority been proactive in refunding applicant's fees when they become eligible?
a)
If the answer to 5 is no, could you explain the rationale behind this approach?
b)
If refunds are not proactively made, can you advise what happens to the funds from the unclaimed refunds, since the legislation was implemented.
c)
Can you advise how much has the authority 'earned'/received in funds for planning applications from applicants that was due to be returned but has not been.
6.
Please provide the contact information for submitting refund requests i.e. the relevant person/team, contact telephone number and contact email address.
7.
Please provide the contact information for the authority's Monitoring Officer, as their oversight may be relevant to my inquiries.
With regards to question 5c this information is not held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Electronic reporting systems are unable to run a report for this information. To ascertain the data requested officers would need to manually check the individual planning case files to ascertain whether an extension of time to determine the application was given on each application.
An initial search has shown that case files of 215 planning files would need to be checked for this information in this way, and it is estimated that it would take approximately 10 minutes to check each file.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 35 hours to complete. Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.
Within the cost limit we would be able to provide a response to questions 1,2,3,4, 5a, 5b, 6 and 7. If you would like to be provided with this information please let us know.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.