Edinburgh Sucks! | Dick Dastardly’s Planning Dept admit failing to have a plan

Andrew Holmes

Dick Dastardly’s Planning Dept admit failing to have a plan

By The Basa ⋅ June 22, 2006 ⋅

It will come as no shock to EdinburghSucks.com’s regular readers that the Planning Department are in chaos despite assurances from Trevor ‘(little) Dick Dastardly’ Davies spoutings to the press that everything is fine and dandy. Perhaps himself and his Director of Development should refrain from writing bitchy letters to the press and get on with doing their job and they will find that their department runs a lot smoother.

Surely the planning department should be the one department in the city who could forsee a staffing crisis looming - the are the PLANning department after all.

Council leaders are to consider spending £1 million in an attempt to cut waiting times for people caught in the city’s planning backlog.

Around 2000 residents and business owners who have submitted planning applications to the council are currently forced to wait longer than the two-month target period to have their proposals considered.

According to the article in the Evening News, this rise has been coming up gradually over 10 years and finally, today, Dick Dastardly and his letter-writer-in-chief Andrew Holmes have decided they need another 24 members of staff at the cost of £1.2 million per year.

Holmes puts a lot of the blame for the delays and increases in costs down the “major applications, such as the Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters” so hopefully he will start billing these major developers for the costs that are incurred - some hope, eh.

It’s not exactly nice to know that the planning department can’t plan and the city development department actually develop backlogs.