I HAVE been accused of many heresies in my time, but until now not of anarchism (BEN, October 11).

I offer no defence of Bolton Council Planning Directorate's niggardly approach to public consultation -- that is a scandal. But I stand by my view that petitions are almost totally useless as a test of public opinion.

Your correspondent Donald Pasquill has a naive and simplistic view of what constitutes democracy. He seems to think that a petition with a couple of hundred names on it should be sufficient reason to alter a planning decision. Sorry -- not in the current state of Planning Law it isn't.

Both statute and case law make it clear what sorts of argument are acceptable in planning law, and what are not.

Unfortunately, quite a lot of the common-sense reasons ordinary people have for objecting to a planning application are not acceptable under the law. "We don't want one of those round here", "It'll spoil the view" and "We've got enough of those already" are all arguments put forward by people opposing planning applications, and none of them can be taken into account by the Planning Committee.

The problem with refusing an application for the wrong reason is that an appeal can then be lodged with the Secretary of State, or the decision can be challenged in the courts. If the Planning Committee has made its decision for the wrong reasons, it will be overturned.

You would expect experienced members of the Planning Committee to know more about what is and is not allowed than ordinary members of the public. As the great Tory philosopher-statesman Edmund Burke wrote in his Letter to the Electors of Bristol in 1835, "I owe you not merely my obedience, but my judgement."

To pretend that a petition against a planning application for a block of flats has any comparison with Sir Edward Coke's great Petition of Rights against unlawful taxation by the king is trying it on more than a bit.

Peter Johnston

Kendal Road

Bolton

Doesn't work like that.

That is still true, and nowhere more than in judging plannng applications.and for access to due process of law, , for the reasons I have already stated,

To begin with, they are almost always against something or other. The campaign to build the Mottram-Tintwhistle-Hollingworth bypass in rural Derbyshire (which, as a matter of fact, I support) is one of the few exceptions.

Planning Law has been being built up slowly ever since the original Town and Country Planning Act in 1947.