More than 200 planning enforcement cases are outstanding in Eden, but the district council has a lack of staff to deal with them.
According to a review which has been carried out on Eden’s planning department, the overriding issue holding back the service is too few personnel.
“There appears to be a regular caseload of over 200 cases at any one time, with less than one full-time equivalent officer to deal with this caseload,” says a report by the planning advisory service.
“Therefore responses are slow, it is difficult to contact an officer and complainants inevitably get frustrated with a perceived lack of action on enforcement inquiries that are raised with the council.”
In addition to the outstanding enforcement cases, Eden also has a backlog of more than 170 out-of-time planning applications which need to be addressed.
The district council’s planning committee met to discuss the findings of the advisory service report, which made 35 recommendations.
The meeting was told that £286,000 looks set to be earmarked by Eden Council in the coming financial year to fill vacancies in its planning department and moves have already been made to recruit new staff.
There are two new planning officers set to start on Monday, with a planning officer, who is also an arboriculturalist, plus an enforcement officer due to join the authority on Monday, January 24.
Fergus McMorrow, assistant director of planning and economic development for Eden Council, said: “Over the last year it has been a difficult situation with an increase in applications, but hopefully we can get that balance right and get the right budget and make those improvements.”
Graham Simpkins (Lib Dem, Brough) said: “We are where we are because we have been working with outdated IT and reduced numbers of staff.”
He asked how long would it be before Eden was on top of the job and no longer had a backlog of applications.
“How quickly do you think we can get up to speed?” he asked. Mr McMorrow said once more resources were in place the authority would be in a position to deal with the workload more effectively than had been the case in the past year.
“Unless, of course, it doubles again, but on the current workload, once we get extra resources, we can expect to deal with it a lot better over the next few months,” said Mr McMorrow.
He added that there was also going to be a significant improvement in IT.
On the question of providing additional resources for planning enforcement to alleviate the backlog of 200 cases, David Ryland (Ind, Hesket) said he was pleased to see an additional £150,000 was being put in place and wanted to know what impact it would have.
Eden’s new principal planning officer, Richard Fox, who replaces Nick Atkinson, said plans were in place to add two more enforcement posts to the team.
Although it was difficult to predict how long it will take to resolve cases, the appointments should have a positive impact on the backlog, he told the meeting.
