Agenda item

(Governance & Development Management Portfolio Holder) To consider the attached report (C-051-2016/17).

(1)        That a District Development Fund allocation in the sum of £51,640 be agreed to fund the appointment of a Grade 5 Technical Officer, Planning Validation from 1 April 2017 to 31 March 2019;

(2)        That a District Development Fund allocation in the sum of £225,794 be agreed for the Development Management Electronic Information/Records Team for 2017/18 and 2018/19 to continue years two and three of the three year strategy to convert Development Control and Building Control paper records to electronic format; and

(3)        That the total District Development Fund expenditure in the sum of £277,434 outlined above be funded by the excess over budget of Development and Building Control income.

The Portfolio Holder for Governance & Development Management presented a report on business process improvement measures for the Development Management team.

The Portfolio Holder informed the Cabinet that Development Management was working towards reducing the time taken to process planning applications to meet statutory deadlines. At the same time there was a need to provide a high quality, cost effective service that would be responsive to the needs of the District and be able to compete against long term competition from the private sector. It was proposed to create and fund a new Technical Validation Officer post on a fixed term basis to support this, for which a District Development Fund allocation of £51,640 was requested to fund a two-year appointment. It was also proposed to extend the scanning of Building Control files and other measures to move away from manual paper records and continue the progress towards ‘paperless’ working within Development Management; for this an allocation of £225,794 from the District Development Fund was requested for the two-year period starting 1 April 2017. It was anticipated that the total expenditure of £277,434 would be covered by the income from Development Management and Building Control to the District Development Fund.

Various members of the Cabinet commented that it was important to improve the planning validation checks undertaken when new applications were received, and it was sensible to fund the proposals from the Development Management income stream. It was also suggested that this could be an area of investigation for the new Head of Customer Service. It was noted that the information available online for planning applications was much improved, and that the implementation of i-Plan had been successful. The Portfolio Holder added that there was a programme in place to add the archival records to i-Plan, as previously agreed.

Decision:

(1)        That a District Development Fund allocation in the sum of £51,640 be agreed to fund the appointment of a Grade 5 Technical Officer, Planning Validation from 1 April 2017 to 31 March 2019;

(2)        That a District Development Fund allocation in the sum of £225,794 be agreed for the Development Management Electronic Information/Records Team for 2017/18 and 2018/19 to continue years two and three of the three year strategy to convert Development Control and Building Control paper records to electronic format; and

(3)        That the total District Development Fund expenditure in the sum of £277,434 outlined above be funded by the excess over budget of Development and Building Control income.

Reasons for Decision:

With the increase in planning applications likely to continue in the foreseeable future, there was a need to ensure that the processing of planning applications met the Government targets of 8 weeks for ordinary applications and 13 weeks for major applications. The appointment of a Validation Officer would jointly relieve pressure both within the Planning Application/Validation Team and Planning Officers who dealt with the technical elements of validating planning applications, as well as provide a better service to the customer.

There was clear evidence that the Planning and Building Control service could no longer be able to economically sustain working with increasingly large volumes of paper. The way forward for all local authority Planning and Building Control Services was to move as far as possible towards ‘paperless’ working, which was strongly supported by the Department of Local Government and Communities and Planning Advisory Services.

Other Options Considered and Rejected:

To do nothing; however, the scanning of the remainder of Building Control, Large Site and Contaminated Land records was essential as they were important records and, in some cases, developing these sites was strategically important both for the Council and the District as a whole.