Charlie Gao.
Active — last recorded decision May 2026
A case officer at Barking And Dagenham with an approval rate of 69% across 319 decided planning applications, spanning 19 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 Barking And Dagenham reports. Attention, not stance.
Mark = borough average (1×). Bar capped at 2×.
Gao's caseload is dominated by Certificate of Lawfulness applications (CLUP/CLUE) and prior-approval extensions, and he is notable for explicitly weighing a site's PLANNING HISTORY of refused applications for similar structures — including appeal dismissals — before assessing the current lawfulness question on its own terms, while being careful to note that 'every application must be determined on its own merits' and permitted-development applications 'must only be assessed under the rules of permitted development' rather than the history of discretionary refusals. He also cross-references a live or recently-decided related application on the same site (e.g. a prior-approval decision under a different reference for the same scheme) when assessing whether a current CLUP proposal is lawful.
· notes a site's history of refused discretionary applications and dismissed appeals for similar structures, but explicitly separates that history from the current lawfulness (permitted-development) test, which 'must only be assessed under the rules of permitted development'
· cross-references a related, differently-numbered application on the same site (e.g. a prior-approval decision for the same scheme under a separate reference) to establish whether the current proposal is already established as lawful
· checks precise GPDO curtilage-coverage percentages (existing plus proposed structures against 50% of total curtilage) rather than assessing a single new structure's footprint in isolation
· whether the site has a planning history of refused applications or dismissed appeals for a similar structure, while still assessing the current permitted-development question independently of that history
· whether a related application for the same or a materially identical scheme has already been decided under a different application reference
· the combined footprint of all existing outbuildings/extensions plus the proposed structure as a percentage of the total curtilage area, against the GPDO's 50% threshold
“every application must be determined on its own merits, and, furthermore, permitted development applications must only be assessed under the rules of permitted development”
23/01096/CLUP
“the officer notes that the same proposal was submitted for a prior-approval application (ref: #23/00911/PRIEXT) in June 2023. The decision made of that application was 'Prior Approval Not Required'”
23/01144/CLUP
Measured from 388 published Barking And Dagenham 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 388 parsed reports. Whether refusals citing each survive appeal isn't traced per policy yet.
Show all 19 rows
Where this officer's caseload concentrates, 2023–26.[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 Barking And Dagenham planning register and published decision notices, 2023–26. · 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 Barking And Dagenham 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 388 published Barking And Dagenham 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.