And

I think it's going to get worse at the end of next month when the National Scheme of Delegation kicks in 31st of October.

So the chief planner or whoever is the key officer and the chair of committee or whoever it is, are going to be under enormous, enormous pressure.

And our line to government in responding to the National Scheme of Delegation, which we supported broadly, I think where it landed was nearly perfect, not quite, there's a few shortcomings in it, but it was nearly there.

It's that you've got to protect the chief planner.

And, you know, they've got to be something like the, is it 151 officer, you know, where it's protected because they are out there in the firing line, not just from the public, but from councillors, as we've seen in certain places in Essex.

it's a mirror that reflects back to society's

priorities and i think it's sort of the growth of social media and all that so people feel anonymous and and you know it's just got out of hand and the other element that's sort of making it worse is the use of ai to produce you know massively long purporting to be legal um objections which are full of rubbish sometimes you know the the the ai that they call it they have um when they make mistakes.

I

agree with that.

But there's a slight flip side to that.

If the chief planner says no.

So let's say there's a, it was a linked person application, but they've changed the name now, hasn't it? So, you know, let's say there's an application by the leader of the council.

and you're going through the the you know the process with the um the chair of the planning committee and the chief planner says well clearly this needs to go to committee and the chair of the planning committee says no no it's fine it's they have to deal with under delegated powers and i think that's wrong What the legislation should have said was, rather than it must, it said should.

Because I think as a person exercising your delegation from full council, you should always, and that's been the case up until now, have the ability to say, I'm not exercising that because in my professional judgment, A, B and C, in this case, in my professional judgment, it's the bloody leader of the council's extension.

Well, POS has put