Planning progress

The authority's chief executive, David Butterworth, clearly hopes to bring an end to the dispute over the Cams Houses planning application in his report to next week's authority meeting in Skipton.

In the report, Mr Butterworth does not suggest that the authority should concede that the application to convert a barn for a local family to live in was handled wrongly in any way. Indeed he wants the District Auditor to legitimise once more the contentious referral back system under which the application was turned down.

But he does want the authority to review the provisions in the local plan which affect such applications, giving it the opportunity to relax policy in certain areas or circumstances.

This is not exactly the offering of an olive branch to the 1,500 souls in the upper dale who signed the protest petition against the park over Cams Houses, but it is a tacit acceptance that the authority does need some flexibility to enable it to act rather differently - and legally - if it sees fit. In short, the policy straightjacket the authority has found itself in needs losening.

Most importantly, Mr Butterworth acknowledges the fact that local residents do not understand the referral back system. It may keep the District Auditor happy in that it protects the authority from litigation, but people cannot understand why authority members are given the opportunity to say what they would like to do with an planning application - twice in this instance - and then be informed that such a decision it would not be in the best interests of the park authority and told, in effect, to change their minds. From the outside it looks like a crazy way to do business.

This is an issue the authority needs to look at and not just to seek to explain more clearly the way this highly controversial system works.

There has to be a better method of reconciling the inevitable tension between planning policy and democratic will