Issue - meetings

To give consideration to planning enforcement operations and assess whether the Committee wish to investigate the matter further.

The Committee received a report on Planning Enforcement from the Development Management and Building Control Manager. The report set out the role of the Planning Enforcement Team and its resources, protocols and workload.

The Council has an adopted Enforcement Protocol which sets out how reported breaches were investigated and allocated priorities, based on the level of harm resulting, to categories of alleged breaches. Each priority had enforcement inspection timescales, very short for high priority and longer for low priority investigations.

In April 2011, planning enforcement migrated two IT systems used by former Crewe and Nantwich and former Congleton Councils to the Swift System used by the former Macclesfield Borough Council. Owing to this, it was not currently possible to provide a full statistical analysis of the numbers and types of enforcement cases under investigation. It was also not possible to provide figures for the number of cases closed. However the report claimed that, from historical data, it was possible to suggest with some certainty that 50-60% of reported breaches turn out not to be breaches at all.

Members of the Committee asked questions and the following points arose:

·         The budget for planning was cut from £1.4m to £700k. the savings were achieved by redundancies. The service had enough resources to deal with the work load at the time.         

·         The Committee wanted to see more Member involvement in planning enforcement and wanted to see Members kept up to date with alleged breaches in their wards.       

·         The report indicated to Members that the staffing of planning enforcement needs looking at. Members wanted to receive more information once IT issues were resolved.       

·         Members were concerned that without an Admin Team the Council were paying highly qualified professionals to do clerical work and this was keeping them from their main duties.      

The Chairman suggested that the Committee commission a task and finish review to look at the issues raised in more detail. The Committee agreed although suggested that the review be delayed until IT issues had been resolved and important data was made available.

RESOLVED: That the Committee investigate Planning Enforcement further in three months when better data is available with the possibility of forming a task group being considered.