PLANNING performance figures at East Hampshire District Council have taken yet another dive in the last few months and will sink even further. That was the message from the council's new head of planning development Daryl Phillips to its overview and scrutiny planning sub- committee last week. But he said work was being done to speed up the planning application process system and a customer charter was being planned which would see big improvements in performance. However, figures would get worse before they got better. Mr Phillips said there were was a "significant" backlog of applications which remained undecided. And he warned councillors: "the scale of the drop (in planning performance figures) is of concern, particularly having regard to the implications that will arise from the high number of applications that remain undetermined". In a stark message to the committee, he added: "Once these begin to filter through, the performance figures will be even further depressed." Mr Phillips was speaking to the special sub- committee which was formed earlier this year to monitor the council's planning performance after it was forced to admit its figures had been fiddled. Much of the blame has been placed at the door of the "target culture" through which planning authorities were being rewarded with huge sums of money if they met government set deadlines for deciding planning applications. EHDC has been forced to repay more than £150,000 in planning grant after investigations revealed that its figures last year were falsified. It was during these investigations that the council's previous head of planning development Ian Ellis resigned from the district council. In the wake of the planning performance fiasco, a raft of recommendations were made to improve performance and progress on these recommendations is being regularly reported to the specially set-up sub- committee. Mr Phillips told councillors last week: "We have a large number of applications that are not determined - and our backlog is beginning to creep up." He said much of the problem appeared to lie with a delay in issuing planning decisions because legal agreements were not completed. "There is a question mark here. We are not clearing enough applications away and building up a a backlog and we have got to get rid of it ." Figures before the sub-committee showed that in the first two quarters of this year 42.9 per cent of major applications were decided in under 13 weeks falling to 33.3 per cent in the July quarter. 58.6 per cent of minor developments were decided in under eight weeks, falling to 47 per cent in April, but rising slightly to 53.6 per cent in July. Other developments started the year at 86.5 per cent in under eight weeks, fell to 76.5 per cent in April, but rose to 80.6 per cent in July. "There is a big chunk of applications in the dwelling category of minor developments going over time," said Mr Phillips, "and the bulk of this is legal agreements." But he stressed that an action plan and a customer charter were being planned which he believed would put EHDC's planning figures back on track. A major factor, he told councillors, was the need to "frontload" the way planning officers dealt with planning applications. This would mean dealing with legal agreements from the start by letting developers know what was required of them and preparing agreements well in advance for those applications which looked as though they would be successful. But he agreed with councillors that the government's financial planning reward "target" system was not the way forward. "The biggest mistake was to link money to this. The eight week figure should be used as a bench mark. Other authorities are saying they can make decision in eight weeks and so we should use this as our benchmark." Mr Phillips said much work could be done to the Acolaid computer system which enabled officers to process and validate applications: "Acolaid is a very good system but we have not been using it effectively." He said he hoped to bring in an Acolaid expert from Basingstoke and Deane, where the system was used very efficiently, to help EHDC planning officers improve their performance. "I want to look at our system, learn it and change it to make it work for us," he said. "At the moment we are not giving officers the time to go out and do their work and talk to applicants because they are bogged down in the processing. "We have got eight weeks to to make a decision. We want planning officers using those eight weeks to look at the applications, do their work and get legal agreements. At the moment it is taking too long to get the files on the officers' desks. It should be a case of three to four days checking and making plans valid. It can be done - everyone is doing it around us. We have got to get the process right." In addition he said he was working on customer focus to ensure that applicants were kept informed about their plans. "We don't tell them anything, we need to tell people what is going on with their plans all the time. "I would prefer having satisfied customers to hitting numbers," he told the committee. Councillors welcomed the actions being taken by officers to improve the planning performance and accepted that figures would dip further before the action plan led to improvement. Christopher Graham echoed the feelings of the committee when he said: "We have got to bite the bullet. These are not the best figures in the work, but we have got to go through it and get it better. If you don't have a good seed bed, you are not going to get a good crop."
