RAY QUANT is deputy leader of Ceredigion council and a cabinet member with enough portfolios to fill a small suitcase - legal and governance, people and organisation and democratic services. As well, there’s his role as Independent councillor for Borth.

You’d imagine that anyone lugging around that amount of specialist luggage must know all about council protocol. But it looks as if Ray’s got a bit of catching up to do.

Why else would he be challenging council officials over a planning application they demonstrate - with clinical impartiality - should be turned down because it clearly falls foul of the local development plan councillors themselves approved nine years ago?

Why, moreover, on the eve of a crunch meeting of the authority’s governance and audit committee set to discuss blistering criticism by Audit Wales, the public sector watchdog, of long-running defiance of statutory-based planning policy by councillors on Ceredigion planning committee?

Mr Quant intervenes in the case of a Llandre couple seeking to renovate a static caravan in their garden to provide holiday accommodation. The problem: this would collide head-on with Ceredigion’s local development plan, a detailed policy document debated at length by councillors and finally adopted by them in 2013.

It’s clear-cut on the matter. No more static caravans, or cabins or chalets, for tourism will be allowed west of the A487 in order to protect the special landscape quality of Ceredigion’s coastal zone. More than that, the planning officer points out, approving the Llandre bid “risks setting a precedent for the uncontrolled siting of caravans in people’s gardens, with owners then submitting applications for the change of use to holiday accommodation at a later date, the result being detrimental effect to the special landscape quality of Ceredigion’s coastal zone.”

Ray Quant tells the planning committee: “I am not aware of any other caravans being used for promoting tourism accommodation in Llandre, therefore I don’t see granting a change of use would upset the balance of tourism caravans in the area.”

His special pleading effectively disregards the fact that local plans are at the heart of the planning system, with a requirement set in law that decisions must be taken in line with them, unless “material considerations” indicate otherwise.

The point is underlined in the Audit Wales report, which says Ceredigion planning committee “routinely makes decisions to approve planning applications based on non-material considerations…(which) contradict the council’s own code of conduct for councillors and officers in planning matters, as well as local and national planning policies.”

The Audit review lays bare the striking record of Ceredigion planning councillors who repeatedly disregard officers’ recommendations and approve applications though they fly in the face of the local development plan.

It reveals a scene of near anarchy. In one extraordinary three-month period in 2019-2020, every decision made by members of the development control committee (the planning committee) was contrary to officer advice, compared with a Wales average of 9.9 per cent.

Between 2019 and 2021, an average of more than 71 per cent of decisions disregarded officer guidance. In the same period, Ceredigion’s record was the worst out of 24 local planning authorities in Wales.

Rebelliousness can be a very good thing, and planning councillors told the Audit they were “passionate about helping their communities.” There’s no doubt that’s true. The trouble is that the Ceredigion record is one of councillor dissent on an industrial scale, extreme enough to threaten the planning authority with dysfunctionality. It’s also nothing new. Fairly regular defiance of Ceredigion planning policy goes back to at least the 1990s.

An obvious danger is that when it’s argued that particular planning bids should be treated as exceptions to general rules, applicants for whom no such case is made may well feel hard done by, and wonder whether it’s because they don’t know the right people. At such a point, faith in the democratic process may become seriously undermined.

One solution is for councillors to now involve themselves closely in the deliberations of an already established working group of members and officials aimed at producing a “replacement” local plan. If councillors feel hemmed in by the current document, let them take a democratic route towards any changes they’d like to see.

At the same time, they, and the public, need to be acutely aware of another problem closely allied to councillors’ disregard of the current local plan. The Audit reveals “longstanding” job vacancies in the planning department, with staffing capacity of “significant concern”, to the extent that, in the last two years, some officers have seen their caseloads double.

On a human level, this is intolerable. But are serious staff shortages surprising? Councillors need to urgently remind themselves that officers don’t make planning application recommendations based on personal whims or preferences, but on legal requirements and policy. If their careful work is constantly thwarted on flimsy or irrelevant grounds - as it is in Ceredigion - it would hardly be surprising if they became badly demoralised and started to wonder whether they were just wasting their time.

Word spreads, a consequence being that the recruitment difficulties spotlighted by the Audit may simply be an inevitable consequence of councillors’ perversity.