JUDGING DEVELOPMENT CONTROL DECISIONS

Development control decisions seek to ensure that planning application s conform to development plans and that environmental externalities ar e minimised, The cognitive continuum and lens models provide framework s for describing how people make these development control decisions i n practice under the Town and Country Planning Acts in England, A disc rete choice decision model is developed to analyse the recommendations of the planning officer and the decisions of the planning committee, using planning applications to develop mineral deposits as a case exam ple, The problem of a 'gold standard' is discussed against which decis ions can be judged, The discrete choice model of planning decisions ha s a high success rate in predicting development control judgements, Th e results demonstrate that cue utilisation by subjects using intuitive decision methods is poor, Planning officers and committee members eng age in differential dimension focus: whilst they believe in complexity , in reality their judgements depend upon just a few major variables.