Russell Smith.
Last recorded decision Aug 2022 — no decisions in this record since
A case officer at Croydon with an approval rate of 73% across 353 decided planning applications, spanning 27 wards.[1] Decision speed and appeal performance publish when decision notices are ingested.
Topic mentions per 1,000 words of their own report text (boilerplate stripped), indexed against all parsed Croydon reports. Attention, not stance.
Mark = borough average (1×). Bar capped at 2×.
Smith's reports concentrate on flat conversions and HMOs and read as the borough's specialist on Quality of Accommodation, running a room-by-room table of required-versus-provided floor areas (National Technical Housing Standards / Croydon's HMO bedroom-size table) before any other topic. He refuses readily on accommodation-quality grounds even for otherwise low-impact schemes (20/01997/FUL, 20/01833/FUL), and is one of the more precise reasoners on access-corridor widths for waste/cycle stores, repeatedly citing the exact passage width in metres against the London Plan's 1.2m minimum.
· builds an explicit per-room/per-flat table comparing required minimum floor area against the submitted proposed area before reaching a verdict, not just a summary statement of compliance
· measures access-passage widths in exact metres (e.g. '0.9m wide') against London Plan/DM13 minimums for waste and cycle storage, rather than describing access as merely 'adequate' or 'constrained'
· flags concerns explicitly as non-fatal ('this is not a reason for refusal') when they fall short of a policy breach, keeping the disposition line distinct from incidental design commentary
· a completed required-vs-provided floor area comparison for every bedroom/flat before accepting a scheme's standard of accommodation
· the exact metre width of any shared access passage serving waste or cycle storage, tested against the London Plan's 1.2m minimum
· whether a parking/cycle shortfall against PTAL-banded standards has been evidenced by a stress survey, not merely proximity to transport
“Flat A, is a duplex and is measured at 56sqm which does not meet the minimum housing standards for a 2 bed, 3 person unit at 70sqm”
20/01833/FUL
“bin and cycle storage are located at the rear of the property accessed down the side passage at around 0.9m wide, which does not meet the minimum width requirement for refuse collection”
20/01833/FUL
Measured from 316 published Croydon officer reports written by this officer, with recited policy boilerplate stripped before any counting. These describe how this officer works and writes — they are not outcome predictions. Every quote is from a named public report.
The policies this officer cites most in their own reports — times cited across 316 parsed reports. Whether refusals citing each survive appeal isn't traced per policy yet.
Show all 27 rows
Where this officer's caseload concentrates, 2020–22.[1] Click the map above to focus this page on a ward, or a row to open the ward.
- [1]Applications decided, approval rate, per-year trend and ward breakdown — London Borough of Croydon planning register and published decision notices, 2020–22. · methodology
- [2]Appeal overturn and decision-time benchmarks — Planning Inspectorate (PINS) appeal decisions and application date pairs; not yet computed per officer, shown as a dash until they are. · PINS appeals casework
- [3]Condition load — mean effective conditions attached to Croydon decision notices (grant/split), parsed from the published notice text; a borough figure, not yet split per case officer.
- [4]"How this officer decides", the policy playbook and all quotes — parsed from 316 published Croydon officer reports written by this officer, recited policy boilerplate stripped before counting; disposition text coded from their own reasoning with every quote machine-verified verbatim. Descriptive of how they work — not outcome predictions.