No objections to planning transparency

Outside the White Hart? No problem. Barbados? See you there.

So when a planning application was posted in Environment's weekly list in early December for change of use of the basement and ground floor at 'Weighbridge House' few realised its importance.

Perhaps Miss Nob was doing something to its basement. The shop did look very quiet.

This newspaper did not see the significance of the development and simply posted a nondescript picture of part of the building.

It was not our finest hour.

It would be a full three weeks before, spurred by the Guernsey grapevine, a reporter went to see the plans and a front page story was published.

Ironically, that night Weighbridge House will have been heaving. As the New Year was welcomed in one of the island's biggest and best-known pubs was jammed with partying islanders, as was the nightclub below.

None could have known that Environment's planners expect that, within three years, neither the White Hart nor Barbados nightclub will exist.

The pub had no chance. Any pub, it seems, can be converted into a shop. The law does not see them as important, not like a hotel or a church. They are ten a penny in Town so close them at will.

Commerce and Employment was also no help. A nightclub is not a 'community facility', despite the community who use it, and, anyway, they want big shops, not small, locally-owned businesses.

But why did no one from the public object?

Perhaps no one knew what was proposed until too late. Perhaps people expected a long planning battle similar to Green Acres or Idlerocks. Maybe everyone expected someone else to object.

Certainly it was not because everyone thinks it's a great idea.

Regardless, there is no route of appeal.

If this chance has gone then there have to be lessons learned. Environment has archaic rules about showing applications, only letting people take notes in person, not photocopies or photographs.

In the internet age and in the spirit of public transparency everyone should be able to go online and see what is coming – before it is too late.