Discretion, and where it actually happens: a planning officer's view from the desk

Much of the current debate about shifting decisions from committee to officer treats discretion as something an individual either has or doesn't — a power, granted by statute, exercised or withheld. Twenty years of development management has left me sceptical of that picture. Discretion isn't a possession. It's something built, case by case, out of arguments that don't resolve neatly, and it's usually more contested — including inside my own head — than the tidy language of an officer's report suggests. The case below is a composite, with identifying details altered, but the deliberation described in it is real.

A case that could either way

For example. An application for a modest, brownfield conversion in an urban area: an underused single-storey structure becoming a two-storey home, with a reasonable package of sustainability measures attached. On a first read, it could look like a straightforward yes. It chipped away at the borough's housing numbers, makes use of a site doing nothing useful, and a local ward councillor is vocally supportive of the environmental case.

Then the objections arrives, and none of them, on their own, are decisive. Conservation and Design colleagues flag harm to the character of the surrounding conservation area — a judgement I don't think is wrong, but isn’t self-evidently right either; reasonable officers disagree about "harm" at the margins more often than committee reports let on. Neighbours object to the increase in scale next to their gardens — again, not unanswerable, but not nothing. And the accommodation itself is thin: single-aspect, a poor outlook, more steps than I'd want to defend at appeal. Building control flagged fire-safety gaps that would ultimately sit in a different regulatory track, but which can colour how confident to feel in the scheme as designed.

Where the deliberation actually happens

None of this reads, on paper, like a hard case. It’s generally, in the room and going back to look twice. A colleague looks at the same file leans toward recommending approval, weighing the housing contribution and brownfield reuse more heavily than I do. I ultimately recommended refusal, weighing the conservation harm and accommodation shortfalls together as cumulatively decisive. I don't think either of us are obviously right. That's the part the finished report never shows: not the reasoning itself, which is documented and defensible, but the fact that a different, equally conscientious officer could have constructed a different — and equally defensible — professional judgement from the same file.

That's what I mean by discretion being produced rather than simply applied. It isn't the officer's private judgement stamped onto a policy test. It's assembled out of a Conservation and Design Officer’s read of harm, a neighbour's account of what a two-storey extension does to their garden, a colleague's different weighting of the same evidence, and the officer's own willingness to sit with genuine uncertainty rather than resolve it prematurely for the sake of a clean recommendation.

What changes as decisions move further from committee

This matters more, not less, as more decisions move to officers alone under the delegation reforms. One concern already raised publicly is that officers handed more unilateral power may become more risk-averse rather than more decisive — reaching for the safest, most defensible answer rather than the best one, precisely because the committee is no longer there to share, or visibly test, the judgement. I recognise the worry. The internal challenge my colleague's different reading gave me on the case above wasn't a formality; it was part of how I stayed honest about how contestable my own conclusion was.

If delegation is going to work, that internal testing needs to be built in deliberately, not lost along with the committee meeting: structured second-officer sign-off on finely balanced cases, genuine space for a colleague to disagree with your read before the recommendation is fixed, and reporting that's honest about where a decision was close rather than presenting every refusal as obviously correct. Quiet confidence, in this job, was never about certainty. It's the capacity to hold a decision you know a good colleague might have made differently, and to explain, on the record, why you made the one you did.

Sandra Chivero is a Planner with more than 10 years’ experience in development management.