Problems with public access to the planning system
(Agenda item added to the agenda at the request of the Area Committee of the County Association of Local Councils)
Issues raised included failure to notify Parishes of applications and the difficulty of identifying applications within the parish, and the difficulty of reading some of the plans online. Please could performance statistics also be provided for the length of time taken to process applications within the District.
Minutes:
Mr. J. Cypher spoke on behalf of Parish Clerks / Executive Officers and raised a number of concerns over problems which had been encountered with their use of the Public Access Planning Application Administration System. Mr. Cypher stated that there were four main areas of concern with the system, namely:
(a) Increased time-load; that is, obtaining / downloading relevant information from the Public Access system, and collating the paperwork in a format which can be presented to meetings of the Parish Council or the Parish Council's Planning Committee. Mr. Cypher stated that the Parish Clerks / Executive Officers work on a part-time basis but the length of time taken in obtaining information relating to planning applications means that, because of Public Access, they are increasingly having to work longer hours.
(b) Non-notification of planning applications - where notification of a planning application received by the District Council fails to reach the relevant Parish Clerk / Executive Officer. Mr. Cypher quoted one example whereby an application for a development of 18 new dwellings had not been considered by the relevant Parish Council Planning Committee because the notification had not reached the Parish Clerk / Executive Officer.
A query was also raised in connection with the "Weekly List" which was supposedly meant to notify Parish Clerks / Executive Officers of all planning applications validated during a particular week, even if the Public Access system was unavailable. It was felt that there were failings in the production of the "Weekly List" as well, with the combined result that these notification issues were compounding each other.
(c) Non-appearance of Parish Council comments - where parish council's do consider applications and make comments via the Public Access system, these comments do not seem to appear on the website. As a result, this prompts questions from adjacent occupiers, interested parties, villages, objectors and supporters as to whether the parish council had discussed the application, had the comments been communicated back to the District Council, and does the District Council know what was said? Overall, the comments facility does not seem to be operating satisfactorily.
(d) Mechanism of submitting comments on the Public Access system - the District Council has encouraged Parish Clerks / Executive Officers to use the Public Access system to record their respective parish council's deliberations and comments on planning applications which they have considered. However, it has been noticed that, having entered the parish council's comments into the relevant field on the Public Access system, and upon hitting the 'Submit' button, two successive error messages appear on screen before the system responds with a "Thank you for your comments" message. Obviously, the two error messages raise the question "Have the comments actually got through; should I email the comments through separately?"
In summary, Mr. Cypher stated that the Parish Clerks / Executive Officers are finding the system unnecessarily time consuming and, whilst Public Access is not deliberately working against the Parish Clerks / Executive Officers, it is not being co-operative in the way ... view the full minutes text for item 5