Issue - meetings

Planning Service Improvement Plan

Meeting: 06/02/2018 - Strategic Planning, Sustainability and Transportation Committee (Item 162)

162 Planning Services Improvement Project (PSIP) pdf icon PDF 78 KB

Additional documents:

Minutes:

Mr William Cornall, the Director of Regeneration and Place, presented the Planning Services Improvement Project (PSIP) to the Committee.

 

The Chairman reminded the Committee that there was an urgent update which included a further recommendation.

 

Councillors Boughton and Hastie addressed the Committee on this item.

 

It was noted that:

 

·  The Planning Review was concluded by this Committee at its meeting held on 13 November 2017. The next stage in the process was the implementation of the selected recommendations.

 

·  The recommendations relating to Members and Committee were considered at a working group consisting of the Chairmen and Vice-Chairmen of Planning and this Committee, Councillor Munford and Officers.

 

The Committee raised the following concerns:

 

·  Afternoon meetings of Planning Committee would mean that both Members who worked full time and members of the public would be precluded from attending. On the other hand, it was suggested that members of the public with young families would be precluded from attending during the evening.

 

·  Decision making was not always of the best quality late into the evening.

 

·  Reducing the size of Planning Committee would mean that there would be less representation from the smaller political parties on the Committee.

 

·  Allowing only one Visiting Member to speak at Planning Committee on each application would not enable the views of opposing political parties to be heard.

 

·  On some planning applications it would be necessary for Officers to spend more time introducing the report and therefore a time restriction on this would not be practical.

 

·  On some planning applications Members of Planning Committee would require more than three minutes to speak on an application, especially when trying to formulate grounds for refusal, and therefore a time restriction on this would not be practical.

 

·  Some planning applications affected several Parish Councils (and sometimes in different ways) and so allowing only one Parish Council to speak would not be reasonable.

 

·  Limiting reports to 10 pages was too restrictive.

 

In response to questions from the Committee, the Head of Planning and Development responded that:

 

·  There were a relatively small number of applications being held up because of the decision making abilities of the Planning Committee. But, there was a backlog of applications waiting to go to Planning Committee.

 

·  In the next financial year (2018/19) it was likely that there would be less outline applications coming to Planning Committee, but more reserved matters.

 

The Committee suggested that consideration be given to recognising neighbourhood forums (where they are recognised as such under the Localism Act) in the same way as Parish Councils in relation to the rules for public speaking.

 

The Committee noted the assurance that paperless working for parishes would not be introduced as part of the PSIP.

 

The Committee queried whether it should state ‘This already exists in the form of the Parish Charter’ in Appendix 2, on page 58 of the agenda, rather than the ‘Parish Service Scheme’.

 

The Committee considered the report and recommendations and requested that the following amendments be made to the recommendations in Appendix 1 before  ...  view the full minutes text for item 162