Agenda and minutes

To approve the minutes from the last meeting.

The minutes of the meeting held on 28 October 2020 were agreed by the members present and will be signed by the Chairman at the next available opportunity.

To receive any apologies for absence

Apologies for absence were received on behalf of Councillor Peter.

To receive any declarations of interest.

There were no declarations of interest.

There was no public participation.

The Chairman invited N March to introduce the report.

N March advised that the report set out the draft licence fees for the next financial year 2021/2022. He highlighted a couple of errors that he had noticed in the fees that were missed when transferring the fees that had been calculated;

Page 42 - policy table, annual fee should say £47.40 + 7.90, not 7.95 as shown.

Page 11 - horse riding, which should be £88 not £116.

N March explained that some fees are set nationally, but most of the fees that can be set by the Council are set by this Committee. Fees that can be set by the Committee have to be set with the aim of cost recovery, but there can also be additional legal restrictions on what can be recovered, and some of the services that we provide cannot have a fee, so must be provided at a cost to the Council.

The fee setting process involves reviewing the costs of the service such as staff and overheads, and the number of each licence that is estimated for the next year, taking into account how much time each licence type requires in order to be dealt with. There has been a significant increase in the internal recharges of around £24k due to management structural changes in Corporate and Contracted services that have led to an increase in the overall cost of the hourly rates that affects all the licences where the Council controls these fees.

Caravan Site Licensing fees have to be set under a specific policy, which was attached as Appendix 1. As part of the fee setting for this regime the policy has been reviewed, the review has not affected the approach taken to this area of licensing, the most significant change has been to remove mention of transitional arrangements for the approach to fee charging which was relevant last year as the policy had been significantly reviewed, but is now no longer relevant (page 4 of the version that was circulated). 

Some fees such as some of the taxi related fees have to be consulted on before being finalised as this is required by the legislation, and the Scrap metal fees are set with delegated authority.

It is requested that following consideration of the report, the Committee agrees the draft fees, and that authority is given to the Assistant Director for Corporate and contracted services in order to agree any final fees following required notices or similar, in consultation with the Chair of the committee.

He welcomed questions from the committee.

Councillor Bassadone queried if it was possible to say how many of the fees were applicable to the people of Dacorum. N March advised that although there were a few fees that weren’t relevant at the moment they set all the fees in case they were needed in the future. With regards to numbers for festivals etc, he advised that related more to the Licensing Act which was set nationally. The  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5.