Decision details

Planning Review - Update Report and Future Actions

Decision Maker: Planning Committee

Decision status: For Determination

Is Key decision?: No

Is subject to call in?: No

Decisions:

[Councillors Blanchard-Cooper and Goodheart left the meeting at the beginning of this item.]

 

Upon the invitation of the Chair, the Chief Executive presented his report to the Committee. He explained that this planning review was commissioned in late 2019 following a series of difficult Development Control Committee meetings. The review started in March 2020 just as the Covid-19 pandemic began and the report was therefore delayed but completed in November 2020. In December 2020 a Members Working Party met and Member recommendations were signed off by Cabinet. He commented that progress had been made on all items and was ongoing. He also corrected a couple of typological errors in the report – 1.4 it should read ’14 December 2020’ or ’14 December 2021’ and in recommendation v) it should read ‘Planning Committee’ rather than ‘Planning Policy Committee’.

 

The Chair welcomed the report and stressed that the cycle of Member review to work through the report’s recommendations needed to start sooner rather than later and would take place at 6-monthly single item Special Planning Committee meetings. He asked that the first meeting be held in early October in order that a second meeting in the cycle could be held before the end of the municipal year.

 

Opening up the debate, Members raised points regarding where responsibility for actioning these recommendations lay (Planning Committee or Planning Policy Committee) and how that was to be determined, the need for Member training and input from Members of what training they felt they needed (more focussed and less general training was suggested with material considerations and its weighting in decision making specifically mentioned), bridging workshops with consultees to improve communication in a less formal setting, the possibility of going further than the recommendations and considering other aspects of the report, and whether the report was ‘live’ and that issues previously deemed as requiring no further action could be brought back for discussion if the situation changed.

 

The recommendations were then proposed and seconded.

 

The Committee

 

RESOLVED to

 

(i)             Note the Member Recommendations/Action Plan (Appendix C)

 

(ii)            Note the Officer Recommendations/Action Plan (Appendix B)

 

(iii)          Approve a virement of £130k (from the Covid-19 catch up reserve) to enable the Officer recommendations from the report to be implemented.

 

(iv)          Support the need for continued Member training on planning matters, as outlined within the Planning Review (Appendix D)

 

(v)           Agree that the Planning Review recommendations should be reviewed, by the Planning Committee, initially six monthly (if the Recommendations are agreed by Full Council), to satisfy themselves that the actions are being followed through.

 

The Committee

 

RECOMMEND THAT FULL COUNCIL

 

(vi)          Agree the Review’s recommendations for the Council (as a whole).

Report author: Nicola Moore

Publication date: 26/07/2021

Date of decision: 21/07/2021

Decided at meeting: 21/07/2021 - Planning Committee

Accompanying Documents: