Agenda item

J Doe introduced the report.

Councillor Matthews referred to Item 12 on Page 30 in relation to Land Charges and noted that the current processing time is 11 days which is below target and enquired as to why that was.

J Doe advised that Land Charges are a very precise thing and the information has to be 100% accurate. The information is gathered from various sources and so can take new officers a little time to get up to speed with the process. The other issue is that we do not have a fully digitalised system and therefore large parts of the process are quite manual.

Councillor Matthews challenged that the project had not yet been fully invested in to digitalise the system and if there were any plans to do so.

J Doe advised that there is a service plan for the department and that one task the new Group manager will be given is to action that project, however it was stated that discussions regarding resourcing of this are yet to be had.

Councillor Ashbourn noted that it was reassuring that the department was back up to full staff strength and noted the earlier comment regarding a back up of applications in a rush to beat CIL, enquired if there was now confidence that the staff were able to cope.

J Doe offered that assurance as they are now processing more applications than are coming in during a week. He went on to advise that they currently had a number of agency staff working at present which has provided professional capacity quickly, with the advantage of being able to let such agency staff go if the workload reduces. . He tempered that with the fact that full time posts are still being recruited into and that the service has grown to the extent that a new full time post has been created.

Councillor Howard enquired as to how much the agency staff had impacted on the salaries.

J Doe advised there is a formalised process that needs to be completed which includes making a case for why agency staff may be required, this is scrutinised by Finance department as well to scrutinise costs and budget pressures.

Councillor Sutton wished to pay tribute to the planning staff. As the previous Chairman of Development Control in the last 12 months he had witnessed the amount of pressure the staff had been under but commented that the quality of work had always been exceptional. He went on to say that it was a department to be immensely proud of and was one of the more professional planning teams if not in the South East, then in Hertfordshire.

The Chairman stated that was supported by the committee.

Councillor Birnie enquired as to what the risk register meant.

The Chairman advised that Risk is something that will be picked up by the Member Development group as a training need as it can be quite detailed.

J Doe advised that what is important is that risk management is an important part of project management and that risks almost become part of the agenda of projects along with finance.

Councillor Matthews asked for clarity on the difference between inherent probability and residual probability.

J Doe advised that once you know what the inherent risk is you can look at what types of mitigation could be brought in and once those controls are applied you should be able to bring the risk level down leaving you with the residual probability.

Outcome

The Strategic Planning and Environment Overview and Scrutiny Committee noted the report.