Development Control and the Planning

Summary. Development control decision s seek to ensure that planning application s conform to development plans and that environmental externalities are minimised. The cognitive continuum and lens models provide frameworks for describ ing how people make these development control decision s in practice under the Town and Country Planning Acts in England. A discrete choice decision model is developed to analyse the recommendations of the planning of ® cer and the decision s of the planning committee, using planning application s to develop mineral deposits as a case example. The problem of a `gold standard ’ is discussed against which decision s can be judged. The discrete choice model of planning decision s has a high success rate in predicting development control judgements. The results demonstrate that cue utilisatio n by subjects using intuitive decision methods is poor. Planning of ® cers and committee members engage in differen-tial dimension focus: whilst they believe in complexity, in reality their judgements depend upon just a few major variab les. The essence of ultimate decisions remains impenetrable to the observerÐ often, indeed the decider himself... There will always be the dark and tangled stretches in the decision making processÐ mysterious even to those who may be most intimately involved. (President John F