Matthew Giles.
Active — last recorded decision May 2026
A case officer at Westminster with an approval rate of 90% across 425 decided planning applications, spanning 5 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 Westminster reports. Attention, not stance.
Mark = borough average (1×). Bar capped at 2×.
Giles works Soho/West End commercial casework — restaurant/retail change of use, shopfront alterations, plant on listed buildings — and is unusually numeric on acoustic assessment, citing the exact design criterion (e.g. '44dB being 10dB below background') against the calculated noise level at the nearest identified sensitive window and stating the resulting compliance margin directly. He tests retail change-of-use proposals against the specific 'three or more consecutive non-A1 uses' frontage-counting rule rather than a general retail-loss judgement, and checks protected strategic views (London View Management Framework vistas) explicitly by name when plant or roof alterations affect a listed building within one. He is willing to note where an objection, though genuine, is not sustainable against the Council's own adopted technical criteria.
· cites the exact numeric acoustic design criterion and the calculated resulting noise level at the nearest identified sensitive window, stating the compliance margin rather than a general 'acceptable' judgement
· applies the specific 'three or more consecutive non-A1 uses' frontage-counting rule to retail change-of-use applications rather than a general retail-protection judgement
· checks named protected strategic views (London View Management Framework vistas) explicitly when assessing plant/roof alterations to listed buildings within their sightlines
· states plainly when a genuine objection is not sustainable against the Council's own adopted technical criteria, rather than dismissing it
· what this officer's reports consistently look for: the exact numeric acoustic design criterion versus the calculated noise level at the nearest sensitive window, with the compliance margin stated
· what this officer's reports consistently look for: whether a retail change of use would create three or more consecutive non-A1 frontages under the Council's own counting rule
· what this officer's reports consistently look for: whether a proposal sits within a named protected strategic view corridor and, if so, its visibility from within that vista
“The calculated noise levels at the nearest sensitive property are 22dB and therefore compliant with the City Council criteria for the hours proposed without any need for acoustic mitigation.”
20/01182/FULL
“The proposal would therefore result in three or more non-A1 uses in a row.”
20/00070/FULL
“The flue projects above roof level, but it is amongst other larger items on the roof and has no impact on the protected vista.”
20/00070/FULL
Measured from 307 published Westminster 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 307 parsed reports. Whether refusals citing each survive appeal isn't traced per policy yet.
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 Westminster 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 Westminster 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 307 published Westminster 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.