Leigh Harrington.
Recently active — last recorded decision Sep 2025
A case officer at Merton with an approval rate of 80% across 492 decided planning applications, spanning 34 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 Merton reports. Attention, not stance.
Mark = borough average (1×). Bar capped at 2×.
Harrington's caseload spans everyday householder extensions through change-of-use and small commercial schemes, and his reasoning routinely opens by explicitly naming the 'planning considerations in this case' as a short list before working through each in turn — a structural habit that keeps mixed-use/commercial refusals (HMO fire-safety, shopfront servicing capacity) legible alongside routine amenity paragraphs. His refusals cluster around retail/frontage vitality (Sites and Policies Plan DM R4's 50%-commercial-use threshold for secondary shopping frontages) and heritage/conservation-area harm where a roof extension departs from the prevailing form of a specific named street, and he is comfortable citing a directly comparable recent refusal on the same or an adjoining site as precedent for a current recommendation.
· opens each report with an explicit named list of 'the planning considerations in this case relate to...' before addressing each one as its own sub-paragraph, even for straightforward householder schemes
· on retail/change-of-use refusals, checks the proposal against the Sites and Policies Plan's own numeric frontage-mix threshold (DM R4's 50% commercial-use requirement) before any design or amenity discussion
· cites a specific, recently-decided precedent on the SAME or an adjoining site (by application reference) as the anchor for a current recommendation, rather than a general area-character statement
· whether a retail change of use would drop the frontage below the Sites and Policies Plan's minimum commercial-use percentage
· whether a recent refusal or approval exists on the same or an adjoining site that the current scheme should be measured against
· whether a roof/heritage-sensitive alteration departs from the prevailing form of the specific named street rather than the area in general
“These considerations are therefore the same as those for the recent refusal LBM ref 19/P3896”
20/P0493
“For this designated secondary shopping frontage approximately 50% of units should remain in commercial uses (A1, A2, A3, A4 and A5 uses), taking into account unimplemented planning permission for change of use”
20/P0383
Measured from 393 published Merton 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 393 parsed reports. Whether refusals citing each survive appeal isn't traced per policy yet.
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Where this officer's caseload concentrates, 2020–25.[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 Merton planning register and published decision notices, 2020–25. · 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 — Merton's decision-notice parsing is limited coverage, so no borough or officer figure is shown.
- [4]"How this officer decides", the policy playbook and all quotes — parsed from 393 published Merton 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.