Luke Bates.
Active — last recorded decision May 2026
A case officer at Islington with an approval rate of 84% across 340 decided planning applications, spanning 17 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 Islington reports. Attention, not stance.
Mark = borough average (1×). Bar capped at 2×.
Bates gives precise metric figures for nearly every dimension discussed (depths to two decimal places, eaves and parapet heights, boundary offsets) and consistently splits neighbour amenity into separate 'Daylight, Sunlight and Outlook' and 'Privacy and Overlooking' subheadings rather than one combined section. He explicitly notes when an applicant has a fall-back permitted-development position as a factor in the design assessment.
· gives dimensions to the decimetre for depths, heights and boundary offsets rather than rounding
· separates 'Daylight, Sunlight and Outlook' from 'Privacy and Overlooking' as distinct labelled subsections
· notes an applicant's fall-back permitted-development position explicitly as a factor supporting acceptability
· what this officer's reports consistently look for: precise metric comparison against the applicant's own previously approved or already-built scheme on the same site
· what this officer's reports consistently look for: the 45-degree test reported separately for plan and elevation, with elevation treated as the operative result
· what this officer's reports consistently look for: whether a fall-back permitted development position exists that would achieve a similar outcome anyway
“In addition, the single-storey rear extension that has been built measures approx. 5.5m deep which is 0.5m deeper than the 5m deep single-storey rear extension of the prior approval consent.”
P2022/0211/FUL
“Officers note that the applicants would have a fall-back position of erecting a dormer of the same positioning and dimensions under permitted development”
P2022/0265/FUL
Measured from 200 published Islington 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 200 parsed reports. Whether refusals citing each survive appeal isn't traced per policy yet.
Show all 17 rows
Where this officer's caseload concentrates, 2020–26.[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 Islington planning register and published decision notices, 2020–26. · 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 Islington 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 200 published Islington 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.