LA charging for TPO advice?

[AHPP]

5 hours ago, daltontrees said:

Personally I think it's immoral to charge. TPO is a huge imposition on a tree owner, and quite rightly TPO applications are free. Pre-application advice from a Council can save it lots of admin dealing with half-baked applications.

The LPA I work for doesn't charge. I usually end up spending a fair bit of time getting the applicant to modify the application to make it competent, and then acceptable. Does applicant benefit from this? Not really, and it's fundamentally wrong to expect them to pay for advice that mainly suits the public.

Cheapskate Britain generally fixes the resources available and then provides only as much of a service as it can afford, knowing that in most cases it won't be able to do things properly. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a society where our laws, policies and values are used as a basis for setting adequate resources?

 

You take pride in your work and, by extension, yourself. Why do you lend your power, name, reputation etc to a system you know is shit?

[daltontrees]

11 hours ago, AHPP said:

 

You take pride in your work and, by extension, yourself. Why do you lend your power, name, reputation etc to a system you know is shit?

It's the only system we have, and it's not sh*t. And I'm paid to do it. Getting people out of bed since the invention of money.

[Dan Maynard]

17 hours ago, daltontrees said:

To be a bit clearer, applicant would pay TO to write an acceptable application that the TO would recommend for approval. Doesn't that sound fundamentally wrong? Is it just me?

Not just you, sounds wrong.

 

The danger I see from LA perspective is that you get a greater volume of speculative applications because pushing in various apps to see what is acceptable is free. In the end more people don't bother applying because not much chance of being caught anyway.

[daltontrees]

1 hour ago, Dan Maynard said:

Not just you, sounds wrong.

 

The danger I see from LA perspective is that you get a greater volume of speculative applications because pushing in various apps to see what is acceptable is free. In the end more people don't bother applying because not much chance of being caught anyway.

I'm not sure that speculative applications are a significant issue, afer all it could take a couple of months before a decision is made (and much longer if it's a refusal based on excessive works), which doesn't allow the underlying problem to get resolved.

 

It's not happened to me so far but in theory I could get 3 applications at once, each for a different % reduction. I'd rather refuse one and approve the other two than have to go back to the applicant and recommend that another application be put in for a lesser % than a single application for the highest %.

 

The position at law as I see it is that a LPA cannot approve something that it hasn't had an application for. E.g application comes in for 40% reduction, LPA cannot approve 20% so it has to refuse and invite new application. Within reason the case officer can allow the applicant to vary the % while keeping the application alive, but it can get messy. A significant audience can build up in curtain-twitching-land, so the rules can't be bent too far even with the best intentions.

[AHPP]

1 hour ago, daltontrees said:

It's the only system we have, and it's not sh*t. And I'm paid to do it. Getting people out of bed since the invention of money.

You explained some fairly major problems with it a few posts up. You clearly understand the nature of property and the impudence of being dictated to but you call for an infinitely funded provision of bureaucrats to dictate to private property owners in your next breath. And money is a weak excuse. There are loads of harmless jobs out there. Do one of those. So why do you consciously choose to put effort into something you know to be harmful? 

[daltontrees]

1 hour ago, AHPP said:

You explained some fairly major problems with it a few posts up. You clearly understand the nature of property and the impudence of being dictated to but you call for an infinitely funded provision of bureaucrats to dictate to private property owners in your next breath. And money is a weak excuse. There are loads of harmless jobs out there. Do one of those. So why do you consciously choose to put effort into something you know to be harmful? 

This is a small part of what I do for work, and an even smaller part of what I do in life. Beyond using opportunities that arise to change or influence things for the better, I do not let it trouble me. Who's to say I'm right anyway. We live in an imperfect democracy. Nearly none of us get to pick and choose the bits of our lives or work that we want to leave because we don't believe in them 100%.

Presumably you're just trying to wind me up. But in summary, this is life. There's no harmless jobs.

[AHPP]

17 minutes ago, daltontrees said:

This is a small part of what I do for work, and an even smaller part of what I do in life. Beyond using opportunities that arise to change or influence things for the better, I do not let it trouble me. Who's to say I'm right anyway. We live in an imperfect democracy. Nearly none of us get to pick and choose the bits of our lives or work that we want to leave because we don't believe in them 100%.

Presumably you're just trying to wind me up. But in summary, this is life. There's no harmless jobs.

No. Genuinely interested. 

[daltontrees]

3 minutes ago, AHPP said:

No. Genuinely interested. 

Fair play to you. But I don't see what my self-contradiction is. TPOs are an imposition on private property rights that should only be used for overriding public benefits. I don't see why the public shouldn't pay for the adminsitration of the controls wher eonwers are jsut wantign to do ordinary things with their trees.

This is child's play compared to the moral repugnance and (in my opinion) illegality of extorting huge CAVAT payments from people who want to remove their own trees.

In a previous career I did a lot of Compulsory Purchase and conmpensation work. This also makes TPOs look trivial. It was a fair system of compensation, but few owners coud get their heads around having their property taken from them. Literally kicking and screaming in some cases.

Remaining objective is essential while trying to bring others along towards improvements by sound reasonable and rational argument. Nothing wrong with that.

[Eskimo]

Thank you everyone for the replies. I thought this thread might take on a life of its own! I have to admit that I am against it. However, there seems to be more LA's than I first suspected doing it. 

[john87]

I do not have a CLUE about TPO's, but if what the council are doing is a statutory function, then no, they cannot charge for it unless this is provided for in the legislation. An example would be that they cannot charge to empty your bin as they have a statutory duty to do this..

 

john..