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6 articles
Nominating a pub, shop, hall or green as an Asset of Community Value is the most popular civic tool on the shelf, and the most misunderstood. A candid walk through the test, the timetable and the limits, for anyone who has ever sat in a back room planning to save the last one standing.
Developer contributions are meant to pay for the playground, footpath or affordable homes that a new estate needs. The paperwork is public, but it is scattered. Here is how to follow the money from planning permission to the thing that was promised.
‘Any Other Business’ is supposed to be the tidying-up item at the end of a meeting. In practice it's where some of the least-scrutinised decisions get made — and where items with no paperwork at all occasionally surface. A field guide to the last page of the agenda, and what you can do about it.
A handful of electors, a village hall, and a polling station open for a few hours on a weekday evening. The parish poll is one of the oldest bits of democratic machinery still in use — and one of the strangest. It rarely changes anything outright, but it has a habit of changing the conversation.
You hit submit on the council’s online form and hear nothing. Here’s the journey a highways report usually takes—triage, inspection, prioritisation and programmed works—and how to write one that is harder to lose.
Consultation season is here again, and with it the familiar feeling that the decision was made before the survey opened. Here is a five-point test you can apply to any council or developer exercise — and what to do when it fails.