CONTROVERSIES at a small village in County Durham and at several in North Yorkshire are being fuelled because the "change of use" planning control is being applied in a way that almost certainly was not envisaged when it was introduced.

In the village context, the idea was surely that there should be a presumption against allowing business use of one of a quiet row of houses in a way its neighbours might consider intrusive. These days, that control is often used to prevent struggling rural pubs and shops being converted into homes that can sold for handsome sums.

Many people would defend this change of emphasis by the planners. The motive is admirable: community life is dented when a village pub disappears; and the local old and the car-less are the worst hit when its shop can survive no longer on their custom boosted only by the occasional convenience purchase by others. But it is important that decision-making councillors should play fair with pub or shopowners who want out.

At Summerhouse (pop 60), between Darlington and Staindrop, Michael and Barbara Ellison say that after 25 years the award-winning pub no longer provides a living. The asking price for the charming Raby Hunt Inn has been cut in the ten months it has been up for sale. Now their application to turn it into two houses has been rejected unanimously by councillors. The Ellisons say their situation is desperate. The Baydale Beck pub nearer Darlington has failed to find a buyer over a longer period.

Hambleton councillors, supported by one who "struggled to find planning reasons" for the decision - against officers' advice - will not allow shopowners at Helperby to turn the premises into a house. Hambleton has finally agreed to conversion of Kirklington's shop, its doors locked since last June; the planning chief warned that refusal would probably be expensively overturned on appeal, as had happened over the ailing shop at Sandhutton.

Although there are disputes about how hard owners try to sell as going concerns (and, at Summerhouse, advice from Camra on how to make the 170-year-old pub thrive in ways that would bemuse its founder, the railway-hating Duke of Cleveland) councillors must be sure they are not relying too much on other people's falling incomes to balance their own social consciences.