"Committee Confusion" and "Secret" Enforcements

At the "Development Control B Committee" held on 27/08/2025 there was a short discussion about Planning Breaches and Enforcement.

In the public forum section of the meeting, Mark Ashdown asked about Planning Enforcement on behalf of the "Bristol Tree Forum", who work very hard to help ensure our "Bark Friends" are properly protected and can flourish in our City.

Mark spoke for 2 minutes and was then told by the Chair (Councillor Donald Alexander) to "conclude your question as we have been very generous so far". Mark spoke for another 10 seconds and made this question very clear.

"Are you the Committee satisfied that you have sufficient information for you to make informed decisions about the enforcement stream process? Thank you."

The convention is that members of the public are allowed one minute each to ask their question, so the Chair was correct that they were being generous by giving Mark two whole minutes. However, the convention of allowing one minute per person is to allow up to 30 people to ask questions or make statements in this section of the meeting (which is allocated 30 minutes). As there weren't any other people waiting to contribute in the Public Forum, the Chair could have easily chosen to let Mark speak for a whole 5 minutes and still have plenty of time for the other agenda items.

The Chair responded to the question by saying that whilst the question was "proper", Planning Enforcement updates only come to the Planning Committee for "noting", not for discussion. Any questions about Planning Enforcement should go to the "Economy and Skills Committee" instead as they oversee the whole Planning function.

It is very confusing when a Citizen wants to ask a reasonable question, but has to try to navigate the opaque Committee System to try and find out who will actually answer their questions. But at least we now understand that questions about "Planning Enforcement" should not go to a "Planning Committee".

You can read about another example of "Committee Confusion" in this news story.

An "Enforcement Update" was presented to the Committee (but remember it was only for noting and not for discussion).

Planning Enforcements are published in the Bristol Planning Portal, so I decided to take a look at that data and see if I could verify this update.

When I searched for Enforcements that were received between 01/04/2025 and 15/08/2025, I only received 21 results, not the 233 I was expecting to see.

What does the public Enforcement Data tell us?

I looked at all of public Enforcement data that is available and created some new "Enforcement Reports" on BU Reports (look for the Planning Button).

Since 01/01/2024, 381 Enforcements have been published on the Planning Portal. These are the status's of the Enforcements:

These are the categories that these Enforcements fall into:

And here are the Decisions:

These are the "Decision Reasons" for the 109 Cases that have been Closed:

Here are some examples of recent Enforcements:

You can view all of the details on BU Reports if you want to explore further yourself.

For people who have read this far I have got a special prize for you.

Watch this short film that shows you what it can be like to navigate "The Bureaucracy".