Last night I went to the Town Hall to see the DC meeting. There was an application for a block of flats opposite the Broadfield Barton car park which I was interested in.

It was strange going back there. In the last year I have not been to the place at all, except for one brief council meeting about a year ago to collect a commemorative glass vase to celebrate my leaving the council, and the last time I went to a planning meeting I was chairing it.

I have to say the experience was… interesting. It was really a case of plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose (and you wouldn’t believe how chuffed I am to be able to work that phrase in somewhere!)

The first difference I noticed was with the declarations of interest, when the members were asked to declare “lobbying interests” first and then the normal personal and prejudicial interests. I thought this was a good idea. In the past the declarations of interest got a bit long-winded and confusing as some members would declare that they had received a letter about an application or had been approached. While this is not really an interest, I guess it is right that it be declared, and separating them from more conventional declarations seemed to me to be a useful innovation.

Anyone who has ever been to a council committee meeting will not be surprised to hear that just about everybody cocked it up. I think there is a basic inability of councillors to listen to, or follow basic instructions. The idea was to declare all instances of lobbying first, and then to start take any personal or prejudicial interests, but straight away they all just declared anything and everything in no particular order. I sometimes think that being a committee clerk must be one of the most frustrating jobs in the world – trying to record all that stuff properly for the minutes. For some reason, images of the Vicar of Dibley sprang into my mind, as they often used to do when I was in council meetings.

The other difference for me was seeing a few new faces around the table. Nearly half the committee were councillors who joined at the same time I left so I had never seen them in action (for want of a better word).

Apart from that, everything was much the same as ever. All the things I was unhappy about before and had tried, and failed to get improved, were still unsatisfactory – the accommodation for the public, the quality of the sound system and the quality of the visual aids were all poor. After every DC meeting I used to write to the Chief Exec and tell him how embarrassing it was to chair a meeting under those conditions, and he would get the engineers and experts to look into it, but although money is always being spent on the system it never seems to improve.

Yesterday was the first time I had sat at the back and got to experience just how bad it was for myself. Fortunately, as in most council meetings, its fairly easy to predict what people are going to say so actually hearing them is not strictly necessary, but that doesn’t apply to any members of the public there for the first time.

I have to say that the meeting proceeded very smoothly, much more so than I expected having seen the agenda. There were a couple of applications for replacing bungalows with blocks of flats in Tinsley Lane and in the past they have attracted large and noisy crowds and huge debate. This time they passed by quite quickly. Maybe the residents of Tinsley Lane have become battle-weary by now? Or maybe there are just less of them left to protest now that half the road has been turned into flats.

One topic which cropped up on half the applications was the matter of traffic impacts. As always, the advice from the highways people was treated with some scepticism by the committee members, and there may be grounds for that.

Several years ago there was a recommendation from a scrutiny committee that the county’s highways department be requested to take into account incremental effects not only of an application, but of other applications in the area, and to show that they had done so. I couldn’t see any proof of that happening. There was no sign, for example, that the advice given for either application in Tinsley Lane took account of the fact there was another application in the same road.

Having said that, the officers who give these recommendations are professional traffic planners (I hope) who know all sorts of techniques and tools for modelling traffic volumes and predicting impacts of development. I know that the results of such work can seem contrary to a layman’s perception and that will never change. I just think they would get a bit more credibility if they showed they had taken everything into account – for all I know they have taken everything into account but are not showing that.

I was a little disconcerted by one councillor suggesting that there was poor advice because the highways were the responsibility of the county and that if the borough had control it would all be different. What was he implying? That an officer’s impartial advice, based on surveys, would be different if he worked for a different authority? That borough councillors would put pressure on them to come to different conclusions? I’m sure thats not what he meant, and he was just sounding off, but you have to be careful about how you phrase these things.

In any case, there is no reason why the planning committee cannot overrule such advice. Why bother having a committee at all if you are always going to just go along with the experts’ recommendations?

Another thing which was depressingly unchanged from my time on the committee was the tendency of some members to disappear at 9 o’clock regardless of whether the meeting had finished.

Altogether I sort of enjoyed myself. It certainly passed the time between dropping our girl off for army cadets and taking her home afterwards. I even met up with an old friend in the audience – Mr Nadaraja from the Sri Lankan hindus – and tried to wangle an invite to one of their meetings.

And yes, I do know that some of this might sound unduly critical or cynical, but I will be feeding back some of my experiences to the chair in an objective and constructive way. Its the sort of feedback I used to try and solicit when I was in charge. I think the new chair handled the meeting well and the only criticism I would have is that I couldn’t hear him very well, but that is partly (mostly?) down to the sound system and my dodgy ears.