SIR – Your story ‘100 flout planning laws, just one pays the price’ (Worcester News , July 28) may have had an attention-grabbing headline, but it’s far from being an accurate reflection of how planning enforcement works in Worcester.

As your story noted, we identified 118 planning enforcement cases in 2011-12, but to imply that by prosecuting just one person we failed in our duties is misleading.

Prosecution is a very expensive means of resolving a planning dispute, and by law we have to do our best to find other ways of tackling a problem before we go down that route. Given that many breaches of planning rules are very minor – sometimes just a matter of a householder having accidentally built a conservatory a few inches too wide – I’m sure most of your readers would agree that this is the right approach.

That is why 69 of those 118 cases were resolved through negotiation while another 22, on investigation, proved to not be in breach of planning rules.

Of the remaining 27, we have decided against enforcement action because it would not have resolved the matter satisfactory or because the breach of planning rules was very minor. Planning enforcement is about protecting the city we live in.

It’s not about punishing people with the full force of the law who, in many cases, have simply made a mistake.

DUNCAN SHARKEY

Managing director, Worcester City Council