Development control decisions seek to ensure that planning applications conform to development plans and that environmental externalities are minimised. The cognitive continuum and lens models provide frameworks for describing how people make these development control decisions in practice under the Town and Country Planning Acts in England. A discrete choice decision model is developed to analyse the recommendations of the planning officer and the decisions of the planning committee, using planning applications to develop mineral deposits as a case example. The problem of a 'gold standard' is discussed against which decisions can be judged. The discrete choice model of planning decisions has a high success rate in predicting development control judgements. The results demonstrate that cue utilisation by subjects using intuitive decision methods is poor. Planning officers and committee members engage in differential dimension focus: whilst they believe in complexity, in reality their judgements depend upon just a few major variables.
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