Toby Cuthbertson.
Active — last recorded decision Apr 2026
A case officer at Westminster with an approval rate of 93% across 371 decided planning applications, spanning 15 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×.
Cuthbertson's caseload is Mayfair/Portman Estate/Regent Street heritage casework with the highest approval rate seen among the top-volume officers in this corpus, and his reasoning is compact and confident: he typically identifies precisely what element of a building is actually listed or significant (a shopfront alone; the front rooms of a townhouse rather than the rear) and treats that narrow scope as the basis for readily approving works to everything outside it. He is comfortable approving works based on documentary precedent (a prior 2007 enforcement finding of no surviving special interest) even without a fresh site visit, and gives real weight to an established local practice of temporary public art in historic garden squares.
· identifies precisely what element of a building is actually listed/significant (e.g. 'listed for its shopfront only') and treats everything else as having a materially lower bar for change
· distinguishes a listed building's higher-significance spaces (grand front rooms) from lower-significance ones (rear rooms, altered basements) when judging whether a departure from scholarly reproduction is acceptable
· relies on documentary precedent (a prior enforcement-case finding on fabric significance) to reach a conclusion without a fresh site visit where the earlier finding remains applicable
· treats an established pattern of previous, similar temporary installations (e.g. sculptures by the same artist in the same historic square since 2013) as supporting a new application in the same vein
· what this officer's reports consistently look for: the precise scope of what is actually listed or significant about a building, rather than treating the whole building as equally protected
· what this officer's reports consistently look for: documentary precedent (prior enforcement or assessment findings) on fabric significance that can stand in for a fresh site visit
· what this officer's reports consistently look for: an established pattern of similar past approvals (same artist, same location) supporting consistency in a new decision
“143 New Bond Street is a grade II listed building in the Mayfair Conservation Area. The building is listed for its shopfront only.”
20/00550/FULL
“An application in 2007 following an enforcement case determined that there were no surviving features of special interest in the basement area. Therefore, though no site visit has been conducted, the works are considered to considered to be acceptable”
20/01890/LBC
“A number of sculptures by the same artist have been displayed in the square since 2013.”
20/01375/FULL
Measured from 306 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 306 parsed reports. Whether refusals citing each survive appeal isn't traced per policy yet.
Show all 15 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 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 306 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.