Your report on Ryedale District Council's recent bad run of planning appeals (Cost of botched planning rulings, December 29) prompts me to put the other side of the case.

If the planning authority grants a planning consent which it should not have given there is no right of appeal except on grounds of legal procedure. Only a refusal leads to an appeal.

Now some appeals will succeed. There is often a subjective element in the assessment of, say, effect on neighbour amenity or on local traffic.

Appeal decisions themselves are sometimes inconsistent reflecting the different professional skills of the appeal inspector.

Occasionally the depth of public feeling is such that councillors feel they have to make a stand despite the adverse weight of planning law.

The only sure way of not losing appeals is to approve everything. Perhaps that is not quite what people have in mind.

It is important that planning decisions are reasoned and defensible. But they must be defensible to the public, not just to the planning professionals.

For myself, I would like to see a more positive attitude - less petty niggling and a more robust approach towards promoting good design (and in the 21st century that means environmentally sound design, not just the "pretty pictures" school of architecture) and encouraging enterprise, creativity and innovation.

It is only fair to point out that this is not what we will get from the over-elaborate national planning framework which inspectors are required to uphold.

Coun Keith Knaggs,

Meadowsweet Cottage,

Warthill,

York.

Updated: 11:10 Tuesday, January 10, 2006