Cyngor Bro Morgannwg
Vale of Glamorgan Council

Re the Vale of Glamorgan Planning RLDP and the Weycock Cross NW Barry site. There are two related issues which concern me as a resident. The first focuses on the Vale RLDP as a whole and a major concern is the manner in which the whole RLDP has been presented to the public and the compressed time period in which to read, digest and comment.

Vale Planning have already recently replied to a number of residents on the above timing question, namely, that they (Vale Planning) were only fulfilling a statutory requirement of six weeks. This response misses the point. The statutory consultation period is not the issue for residents. The core issue is rather the clumsy, overlong and ill-organised character of the whole RLDP, which eats up time. Vale Planning have a public duty of care for local residents, namely, to minimally help and facilitate public understandings of the issues. Sadly they entirely failed in this basic responsibility. Intentionally or not Vale Planning quite literally dumped thousands of pages of technical documents on the website with little or no guidance or clear pathways for ordinary readers, which is an unforgivable administrative lapse.

Vale Planning have argued that they do provide short executive summaries for documents. However this argument cuts no ice. Most of the executive summaries give no clear indication as to whether there are any substantive details about a relevant site for the reader. Therefore one can only ascertain whether a particular site is being addressed by trawling hundreds of pages of dense technical text. Consequently, the arguments that residents should either only read and comment on their own site, or that they should only read executive summaries, is spurious. Multiple PDFs in the RLDP on, for example, traffic, drainage, the environment (dropped in at random throughout the whole RLDP website), will often contain more detailed micro-policy comments on a relevant site. However, such micro-policy comments are literally submerged deep within hundreds of pages of dense text. The overall effect of this kaleidoscopic website is thus continual bafflement.

Like many residents I attended the walk-in sessions with Planning; however the only advice we were given by Planning operatives when we raised critical queries was that we had to consult the details of the online website. Notably this was also the same case for any paper-based responses. The supposed online evidence documents had to be addressed. The website has therefore been the evasive linchpin of this whole debacle. This makes the whole consultation process largely inaccessible to ordinary folk and those who have limited digital skills or limited time due to responsibilities. In point, for those with limited digital skills, the online RLDP offends against basal principles of natural justice. It is intrinsically discriminatory. This is simply not democratic consultation.

It is worth noting here, in passing, the factual nature of this timing issue. In running a Microsoft's CoPilot AI full analysis of the current RLDP, in terms of basic reading time, evaluation and assessment of the document. CoPilot concluded that "It would take a single reviewer approximately 1,103 hours (roughly 27.5 weeks of full-time work) to complete this task". This would be reading every day, all day, for 27 weeks. Bizarrely, Vale planning and Council appear to see no problem here whatsoever.