Cheshire East Council has drawn up a 78-point action plan to modernise its planning service following a backlog in applications and increase in complaints, writes Belinda Ryan.
A resident survey revealed only 20% of customers are happy with the service.
The survey also showed only 19% were satisfied with how Cheshire East deals with planning generally and 53% who had commented on an application, were also dissatisfied.
Executive director of place Jayne Traverse stressed the “deep dive review”, which started in January, was not an investigation into the service, but was “improvement focused” and also highlighted where things worked well.
But she said the planning department, which is the eighth busiest in the whole country, was already in a “fragile” state before the pandemic.
She told the environment and communities committee: “They were just about keeping head above water with the number of applications, the staffing levels and, even then, some real challenges around things like IT and vacancies in the team.”
She said things became worse during the pandemic when the number of applications soared at a time when staff were working from home, but things were improving now.
“The application backlog has reduced considerably in the last 12 months and we’re now at 13 weeks in terms of delay,” she said.
“The numbers are coming down and we are processing more applications than we are receiving now.”
Mrs Traverse said some changes had already taken place during the review period.
The contract with Capita [planning services] had been extended, some new staff members had been recruited and two fast-track days had been held to quickly process applications.
The committee was told that during the review six main themes had emerged.
These were capacity, workload, and recruitment; culture and leadership; processes and use of technology; customer experience; policy and governance; and members [councillors].
With regard to customer experience, Mrs Traverse said there were some “pretty difficult statistics” and “it can improve significantly”.
Nantwich Cllr Peter Groves(Con) suggested the number of people trying to contact the council by phone or email for information about applications would be reduced if the planning portal was improved and made more user friendly – although he acknowledged Cheshire East didn’t control the portal system.
With regard to councillors, the report stated Cheshire East planning meetings were lengthy and “they do take a heavy toll on resources”.
Cllr Charlotte Leach (Mobberley, Con) said councillors should be stopped from going off at a tangent during meetings.
“I’ve sat in a number of planning committee meetings where lengthy debates happen that have no relevance to the application in front of members,” she said.
More training was suggested to overcome this.
Cllr Les Gilbert (Dane Valley, Con) asked whether the council should be more robust when it came to enforcement.
“You identify there have only been 11 enforcement notices served in the last year across the whole of the borough,” he said.
Mrs Traverse told him: “If you increased the team hugely, you would never have enough capacity with enforcement and there are real legal parameters that the team have to work within.”
She added there were a lot of misconceptions among the public about what is and is not a breach.
The committee approved the recommendations, which included setting up a transformation board to oversee the modernisation plan, with chair Mick Warren (Ind) saying, while some actions could be quickly undertaken “this isn’t going to be an overnight transformation or change of the service”.
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