I returned from a holiday in Peru last week to a planning committee report that I consider a disgrace. Having been withheld from the agenda of the September meeting because of false evidence, 14 Cambridge Road was on yesterday’s committee agenda with an officer recommendation for approval. I read the officers’ report and I was appalled.

On Tuesday afternoon I wrote to the planning committee members and the council’s legal officer pointing out the failings in the report. I suggested they risked court and a Judicial Review if they proceeded. Shortly afterwards the item was pulled off the agenda for Wednesday. The legal officer later received a solicitor’s letter on behalf of local residents containing threats of legal action.

Along with others, since August I had been pointing out to officers from the chief executive downwards that evaluation of the traffic impact of the proposal for homes, offices and a shop had been based on false evidence of past authorised use of the site; on claimed former building dimensions that were twice the area of the whole site; an impossible starting point for deciding whether this latest proposal would improve or aggravate prevailing traffic chaos and dangers on the former A11 road outside the site.

Yet this week’s report continued to claim that the traffic levels would be reduced despite a professional assessment showing they would rise to 300% of the traffic previously generated. The report then totally lost the plot by claiming that a traffic assessment was unimportant and was not needed! I thought only politicians were supposed to avoid uncomfortable evidence when it didn’t suit their argument!

The report went on to misquote last year’s planning Inspector for the appeal (on the last rejected application on the same site), claiming he thought there was no traffic problem, when he had said no such thing. He had accepted Essex Highways assurances that there was no traffic impact; but Essex’s assessment (if indeed they actually carried out an assessment), or their assertion (if they hadn’t even bothered to make an assessment) was also based on false data from all four applicants on this site since 2012. So the councils had misinformed the inspector and it wasn’t his job to do their work for them. So quoting him in defence of the indefensible was most inadvisable.

These behaviours matter. Many of us are trying to rebuild trust in Uttlesford’s planning department after the debacle last December of the failed local plan. Events like this week’s undermine confidence and trust.

My letter to the planning committee and the council’s legal officer can be read here.

This story is the lead on today’s front page of The Herts & Essex Observer (Dunmow & Stansted edition).