Report based on the scoping exercise conducted 23 July 2018
Councillor Nick Ridley – Babergh Cabinet Member for Planning
Councillor Glen Horn – Mid Suffolk Cabinet Member for Planning
Minutes:
21.1 The Chair began by welcoming and introducing the witnesses attending the Committee, they were:
James Tanner |
Hollins Architects, Surveyors and Planning Consultants
|
Phil Cobbold |
Phil Cobbold Planning Ltd.
|
Steve Merry |
Transport Policy and Development Manager – Growth, Highways and Infrastructure
|
Julia Cox |
Development Management Engineer – Growth, Highways and Infrastructure |
21.2 Councillor Nick Ridley, Babergh Cabinet Member for Planning, introduced Report JOS/18/16 and pointed Members’ attention to the main points in the report. He said that there were comments in the report, which the Planning department were to address.
21.3 Councillor Glen Horn, Mid Suffolk Cabinet Member for Planning, agreed with Cllr Ridley and added that the summary of the Charge Pre-planning Application survey had been useful and had resulted in a plan on how to improve the service. He drew Members’ attention to bullet point 3.2 under the Recommendation, which detailed an action plan for improvement to the Charged Pre-planning Application.
21.4 Phil Isbell, Corporate Manager – Growth and Sustainable Planning, provided a verbal update in relation to bullet point 4.19 and said the figure was 0.2, which did not provide enough evidence for a correlation between fee exception and refusals of planning applications.
21.5 Councillor Field questioned the reduction in enquiries (bullet point 4.4, page 45) and the response was that previously householder enquiries had been serviced by free pre-applications advice. However, these enquiries were now mainly being direct to the self-service portal on the website. This had been predicted and did not have any influence on the predicted income for the Charged Pre- application income. There was no evidence that applications were rejected due to applicants using the self-service application. The exception was for applications for listed buildings, which were free. Some agents did not use the pre-application advice for these, as officers were to conduct a site visit anyway.
21.6 Members enquired for clarification for bullet point 7.2, page 50 and officers responded that the service team provided a basic sign posting response and advice to enquiries.
21.7 Councillor Lavinia Hadingham ask how the survey had been conducted and how the feedback had been collected and if it was to be considered to have an on-going survey when an application had been completed. The Corporate Manager said that the survey had been an on-line survey conducted during the whole of May 2018, and that the team had invited everybody, who had used the pre-application service to respond. This had been considered to be the most effective way to capture customer satisfaction at this stage of the Charged Pre-application implementation.
21.8 Consideration was given to introducing a customer satisfaction survey in relation to planning application and pre-application advice. Members were advised that it should be taken into consideration that if applicants were to respond at the end of their applications, some may be influenced by the outcome of the application.
21.9 The Chair invited the Witnesses to make comments.
21.10 Steve Merry, Transport Policy and Development Manager – Growth, Highways and Infrastructure to comment. He said the paid pre-application service had overall been a success and had resulted in improved planning applications. There were still a few issues to address such as timing for responses to applications.
21.11 Phil Cobbold, Phil Cobbold Planning Ltd, said that as an agent he was more concerned with the level of advice and that the charge for the pre-application advice was a small cost to pay. He believed that for agents, timing was important but that agents would rather wait to receive good advice which would support planning applications. In his experience there was often an inconsistency in the advice received on site visits and the written advice. Recently he had received three refusals on applications which had received positive advice. This he contributed to staff turn over and the inexperience of some staff.
21.12 James Tanner, Hollins Architects, Surveyors and Planning Consultants, agreed with Mr Cobbold. He added that the pre-planning advice was much more robust now. He said that site visits were a good opportunity to resolve initially queries. He felt that the officer attending the site visit should also be the designated planning officer. However, this was not currently the case. He continued that it was important to manage client expectations and that he recommended pre-application advice to his clients as he felt the advice was good. He believed that clients were happy to pay for the pre-planning advice if the service was beneficial to them.
21.13 Members asked further questions in relation to the inconsistency discussed above and the work flow detained in paragraph 4.26 – 4.28 and the Corporate Manager responded that it was intended that in the future the officer, who conducted the site visits would also be the designated planning officer. This would be supported by the new software, which was currently being implemented in the department.
21.14 Members then discussed application for listed buildings and the responses received in the survey on page 79 – 81. It was established that planning applications for listed buildings received free pre-planning advice and that the survey indicated that applicants were generally satisfied with the service they received.
21.15 Mr Cobbold added that he had received one pre-application advice on a listed building in the last few months and that the advice had been reasonable and on time.
21.16 Mr Tanner said that the architectural survey involved more for listed buildings. In his experience the Suffolk Heritage struggled with response times for advice on proposals before the planning application. He added that recently there had been inconsistency in getting heritages officers on sites to comment on proposals, and this area warrant more attention due to the nature of listed buildings.
21.17 The corporate Manager informed Members that the management of the Planning department and the Heritage team were meeting later in the months to take advice on how to improve and resolved some of the issues discussed.
21.18 Councillor Elizabeth Gibson – Harries asked the officer from Suffolk County Highways to comment on why it appeared that the Highways department failed to respond to the Parish Councils on planning applications.
21.19 Councillor Field asked what kind of advice applicants received at the pre-planning stage of an application.
21.20 Mr Merry responded that usually this involved a site visit, which took the form of a scoping and early warning of potential issues but did not include any discussion of the impact of traffic flow or potential accidents as it was not possible to assess this in the early stage of applications. Officers provided a steer to the applicant as to what information the Highways department required for the application.
21.21 Councillor McCraw referred to the risk analysis on page 50 to page 54 as he was concerned that the risk was ‘probable’ and the Corporate Manager said he agreed and that this had been discussed with the Corporate Manager for Internal Audit.
21.22 The Chair thank the witnesses for attending the Committee
21.23 Members were informed of the fees charged for the Pre-planning Advice as detailed in Appendix A.
21.24 Members were concerned about the timing of when customers would be able to provide feedback on the service received from the Planning Department. Some felt that it should be conducted after the pre-planning advice had been provided and others felt it should be on completion of the planning applications.
21.25 Members made the following suggestions to the recommendations:
· 3.2 to replace the word ‘ensure’ to ‘promote’
· Replace ‘ensure’ with the word to ‘achieve’ in the third bullet point
· to change ‘Repeat customer satisfaction survey mid-2019’ to ‘Repeat customer satisfaction survey mid-2019 and to evaluate when the best time will be for conducting this survey’.
21.26 The amendments were proposed and seconded.
By a unanimous vote
It was RESOLVED: -
1.1 That the contents of the report be scrutinised by the Joint Overview and Scrutiny Committee for review and
1.2 That the Joint Overview & Scrutiny Committee agree that the recommendations below are robust enough to promote the continued improvement of the charged pre-application service:
· Embed a “right first time, on time” approach to pre-application advice offer through consistent use of Enterprise and 1-2-1s.
· Establish management monitoring and intervention measures to achieve nil rate of refunds in the forthcoming year.
· Review charging arrangements for site visit elements of pre-application advice services to better reflect time and resource costs.
· Review pre-application charge exemptions or discounts for community groups or other organisations where relevant support is already being provided by the Councils.
· Introduce cancellation administration charge where meetings are cancelled by the enquirer at short notice.
· Repeat customer satisfaction survey mid-2019 and to evaluate when the best time will be for conducting this survey.
· Review potential for and introduce as appropriate additional service offers and cost recovery associated with other internal stakeholders (including Housing Enabling, Communities, Public Realm, CIL, Planning Policy) with appropriate Service Level Agreements to underpin delivery.
Supporting documents: