Oh dear. Both BEagle and PPrune Pop show a certain ignorance of planning matters.
Yes Wealden District Council is a majority Conservative Council, however if you look at the agenda of the planning meeting where this application went to committee with a planning officer's recommendation for refusal the wording and report is ALL made by planning officers who are paid employees. That includes the second quote. They are there to implement Government planning policy and as WDC have rightly pointed out if Brown wants to get into the act he should change planning policy to allow those who have been wounded serving their country to get around current planning restrictions.
Councillors are NOT allowed to interfere and try and influence planning officers in coming to their decisions. If they do not like the decision a planning officer is going to make then any district councillor can insist it goes to Committee where they can try and get other councillors to change a recommendation whether for a refusal or for granting.
I refer you to my post#50 of the 1st Feb. Long before any petitions were mooted and well before Brown tried to make political capital out of this I said that because of the publicity, thanks to the Sun and their readers and perhaps by the likes even of BEagle
and others writing direct to Wealden Council, that the way forward was for a new application to be made with a few changes to allow all to save face and approve a new application and clearly that is EXACTLY what is now happening.