The O2 Centre site in West Hampstead

A FAMILIAR scene played out at the Crowndale Centre on Thursday night as the first phase of the O2 Centre redevelopment was approved by the council:

1. A very long meeting. Yes.

2. Heartfelt pleas for a different approach. Yes.

3. Some technical questions. Yes.

4. A final vote which could have been predicted to a tee from kick off. Yes.

5. Cries of “Shaaaame!” from the public gallery. Yes.

The planning system is often thought of as a key ventricle in the beating heart of local government democracy.

People assume, quite legitimately, that they can change the minds of elected councillors by appealing to them in a public setting.

The reality is that this is little more than a conceit. Legally, whether people do or do not want something is not how applications are determined.

Applications, however distasteful, are assessed in a crushingly dispassionate way against a set of fixed policies – and the overbearing threat of expensive appeals.

These decisions are more or less made even before they reach the committee stage. And so it took three-and-a-half hours for the council to simply go through the motions on Thursday night.

Members of the public give up their evenings and come to the council for planning meetings, often speaking with a passion that suggests they truly believe they might sway opinion if they could just be persuasive on the night.

In reality, a committee member changes their mind during a meeting once in a blue moon. Regardless of the merits or downsides of the O2 overhaul, why do any of us – the councillors included – entertain this performance?

Would it not be better to be honest to the visitors that once it reaches this stage, it will make very little difference what anybody asks or says in the meeting?

Voices must and will be heard, but rarely, if ever, listened to. “Listening” is now so often a watchword of those in power seeking to promote their own credentials. But the reality of this process is the sight of meetings concluding with hackneyed cries of “shame”.

Planning, chairwoman Cllr Heather Johnson took a confrontational approach to last week’s heckling, insisting: “I’m so fed up with people who play to a gallery as such. You don’t realise how hard this committee works.”

It is no doubt true that councillors put in a lot of work for little financial gain. But if the public are simply left to blithely view decision-making in action, then it’s the planning system that is playing to a gallery.

Let’s not pretend anything otherwise.