Ian Opolot.
Active — last recorded decision May 2026
A case officer at Harrow with an approval rate of 74% across 285 decided planning applications, spanning 22 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 Harrow reports. Attention, not stance.
Mark = borough average (1×). Bar capped at 2×.
Opolot's amenity reasoning consistently works impact-by-named-neighbour with an emphasis on orientation (north-west vs south-east facing gardens) to judge daylight/sunlight risk, and he is more willing than most colleagues to invoke a formal pre-application/Conservation Officer discussion as a factor that shifted the scheme to acceptable. His character assessments frequently note visibility 'from the public realm' as the deciding factor for whether bulk matters.
· assesses daylight/sunlight risk by naming the compass orientation of the affected neighbour's garden (e.g. 'north-west facing, significantly reducing the risk of extensive interruption to daylight/sunlight')
· references a specific pre-application or Conservation Officer discussion by name/reference when it changed the design outcome
· frames character harm around visibility 'from the public realm' rather than a blanket bulk assessment
· what this officer's reports consistently look for: the compass orientation of a neighbour's garden as the deciding factor in daylight/sunlight risk, not just the distance
· what this officer's reports consistently look for: whether a scheme was previously discussed with the Conservation Officer at pre-application stage and amended as a result
· what this officer's reports consistently look for: whether extension bulk is visible 'from the public realm' as the threshold for character harm
“it is considered that the gradual reduction in height as the ground floor extension increases in depth ensures that the development would not have a detrimental impact on the amenity”
PL/1812/24
“following discussions with the Local Planning Authority's Conservation Officer, it is considered that the increase in bulk would not be of significant detriment”
PL/2000/24
Measured from 330 published Harrow 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 330 parsed reports. Whether refusals citing each survive appeal isn't traced per policy yet.
Show all 22 rows
Where this officer's caseload concentrates, 2024–26.[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 Harrow planning register and published decision notices, 2024–26. · 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 Harrow 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 330 published Harrow 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.