DORSET Council is preparing to declare a nature emergency – giving more time and energy to protecting our environment. It’s hard to argue against it.

At the same time the Government want to ease planning laws and make it more straightforward to build the homes it says the country needs.

Putting aside the amount of applications for homes which are granted and then not built with developers ‘land banking’, the two aims are not exactly pulling in the same directions.

But is there an argument that too much planning time is spent on things which, perhaps, might not matter too much in the grand scheme of things?

I picked a day at random from Dorset Council’s planning portal – a day in which just under fifty applications were decided.

Of these a staggering 32 applications dealt with applications to do something to trees - ranging from felling completely to just lopping the odd limb, or even pruning. Almost all were approved, or listed as ‘no objection’, or even ‘does not require consent.’ Of the 21 applications for trees which have a Tree Protection Order, 17 of the applications were consented; two refused and two had split decisions. So most were of no concern, even when a tree has extra measures to preserve it.

Almost all of the other applications, to my mind, come under the category of ‘minor work’ – these included changing the type of roof tiles; renovating a kitchen and bathroom and fitting new windows; a single storey side extension; a two storey extension with a balcony; two applications (surprisingly) to construct a pool house; building a replacement beach hut; adding hard standings and glamping pods at a campsite and, arguably, the most controversial of all – a change of use from offices above a Weymouth shop, to flats, which was refused.

None of these are major, most probably the sort of changes which a neighbour might not have given a second thought to – but yet will have taken diligent planning officers shedloads of time…. all at a cost.

Is it all justified when planning officers might soon find themselves facing a veritable avalanche of new applications for housing, many of which might have to be decided with a relatively short timescale at a time when there is a national shortage of planning officers?

I know planners will say something along the lines of “the rules are the rules and we have to uphold it” – but maybe it is time to remove some of the unnecessarily trivial changes to personal property from the formal planning process?

How about a rule that says - “no objections, it goes through; one objection or more and our experts take a close look at it.”?

But then that relies on people knowing about the proposal to begin with - which is a completely different story considering Dorset Council's notification system is hardly the most user-friendly and notices of planning applications are seldom posted outside properties, or advertised in newspapers, as they used to be.