ENVIRONMENT’S move to reinstate a 15-year-old planning brief against which to judge the prestige Admiral Park development will mean that islanders have less of a say in the process, an emergency Billet d’Etat released today reveals.

The report also details the department’s U-turns on assessing the application since pulling it from an open planning meeting in November.

It was dropped because the department failed to spot that the 1998 outline planning brief by which the development was being assessed had expired.

The Billet report shows that it was only in discussions with the developer which followed that a question was raised about whether a development brief was needed instead, which prompted the department’s latest U-turn, asking the States to pass a new law and reinstate the original outline planning brief instead.