GIVEN the current interest in the way that the island’s planning service handles at least some applications that come before it, the involvement of the Scrutiny Committee in its performance is also revealing.
Its headline task is to review the action taken by the Environment Department  and the Strategic Land Planning Group in addressing recommendations made in the report completed two years ago by former UK chief planning officer Chris Shepley.

In particular, Scrutiny wants to know what has been ruled in or out, and why, and what key performance indicators the department is using to help guide and improve its operation.

The suspicion is that Scrutiny’s interest has been triggered because Environment hasn’t done very much with the Shepley report and it is too expensive and too far-ranging to be put in a draw and forgotten.

That fear will not have been allayed by the department’s comments to this newspaper last week which suggest that it has not done very much at all on one of the recommendations, opening up its board planning discussions to the public and media.

That level of progress is disappointing although the department has improved accessibility significantly through its online, map-based search facility and is to be congratulated on that.

However, Shepley went very much further in his recommendations and observations:

‘It might be said that the fundamental issue which the States needs to address is the way the States and its departments operate, the way decisions are made (or not made) at member level in the centre of government, and the political structure which leads to conflict, pressure and uncertainty for the planners,’ he wrote. He also quotes an unnamed deputy as saying ‘…there is resistance to the idea of leadership… the system is designed to stop people doing things’.

The recent attacks on the Wales Audit Office report on good governance and the reluctance to tackle the six failings it highlighted show how potent that resistance to change actually is.

What Scrutiny is attempting to find is whether Environment is also averse to change and what sort of a job it is actually doing.