25 October 2022
Your request
- please let me know how the area of the total percentage of ground covered by the development has been calculated for the purpose of policy Q16 D of the Lambeth Local Plan 2020-2025.
- please treat the following as a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Please let me have all of the following documents relating to planning application 21/03960/FUL:
- meeting agendas, notes and minutes of meetings of Lambeth Council including Planning Application Committee meetings;
- notes of site visits; Lambeth Council internal emails; emails between Lambeth Council and the applicant; Internal record of planning decision and
- reasons.
Our response
- I am pleased to provide some of the information you have requested. I have detailed below the information.
- with respect to part 1, the calculation for the total percentage of ground covered by the development required under Policy Q14 of the Lambeth Local Plan was calculated by scaling the proposed plans on the Council’s Bluebeam software.
- The calculations were as follows: Site Area [excluding access route]:279.75m²
- original building: 60.96m²
- total curtilage: 218.79m²
- proposed building ground coverage: 41.31m²
- ground floor percentage: 18.88%
- with respect to part 2 of your request, please find attached the Delegated Register. This sets out the planning decision and the reasons why the development was considered to be acceptable.
- with regard to the remainder of your request, under Regulation 12(4)(b) of the Environmental Information Regulations the request is refused on the basis that it would be manifestly unreasonable as it would be extremely burdensome and time consuming to collate the requested information and would result in the unreasonable diversion of resources.
- it is estimated that there are in excess of 250 emails and attachments to examine; we estimate that it would take 5 minutes to search/redact each file. This would take at least 20 hours.
Public Interest in disclosure
We note that Regulation 12 (2) has a presumption of disclosure.
We also note that this matter is likely to be of interest to the local community.
Public Interest in maintaining the exception
We consider that compiling a response to this request would be a significant diversion of resources which would not be in the public interest as it may disrupt other decision-making or other workloads. We also consider that information has been published via the above web-links and that information will continue to be published online as appropriate. This meets the public interest in providing information relating to this site.
We consider overall that the public interest in maintaining the exception outweighs the public interest in disclosure.
Conclusion
We believe that the cost of compliance with the request would be too great and that the request is manifestly unreasonable and that therefore Regulation 12(4)(b) of EIR can be considered.
For these reasons we believe Regulation 12(4)(b) applies and the reasons against disclosure outweigh the public interest in providing the information.
This response therefore acts as a refusal notice under regulation 14 of the Environmental Information Regulations.