I’m going to blow my own trumpet a little bit here, because nobody else is going to think about us has-beens, and why should they?

Crawley council were on a hit list of 9 councils because of its poor performace in dealing with planning applications. Now, accoring to our local paper the government have “heaped praise” on CBC for its improvement. The ODPM’s press release is here.

In my last year chairing the development control committee I spent a lot of time working with the head of planning to get some changes made to the system. As a starting point I said I recognised that many changes would be purely internal to the department, but wanted to see if there were any ways the committee could affect overall performance. I got all sorts of statistics out of them and we agreed that two things would help.

Firstly we saw that the timescales meant that there was not really enough time for an application to go through two committee cycles. In most cases, if a case was not decided but was deferred until the next meeting it would almost certainly bust the target timescales. Usually applications were deferred when a member said they could not decide without going on a site visit and called for the matter to be held over so that a visit could be arranged before the next meeting.

So I arranged for our regular site visit session to go and visit sites which were likely to cause such a situation before they came to committee. As a result the number of deferrals (is that a word?) went down. There were still some, and I was thinking about how to tackle them when I got booted out.

Secondly I supported changes to the scheme of delegation so that more applications would be decided by planning officers, leaving only the really juicy ones for the committee. The officers had wanted this for quite a while I think, and were probably relieved to have a chair who was pushing hard for something they wanted anyway.

There was some resistance to the idea from members, and a lot of suspicion. Some of them were on the old planning committee when the town only had a dozen applications a month and the committee could easily decide every single one. I don’t think they were really adjusted to today’s level of activity. Ironically, the most suspicious members were the very ones who always left the meeting early – at about the point where we reached all the applications which would probably get delegted under the new scheme.

Anyway, after lots of redrafts and different versions going to DC, I finally got the revised scheme of delegation into the council’s constitution at the last meeting before the elections. Or was it in the new constitution for the first meeting of the new council? Anyway, I just about saw it through.

I don’t know if anyone has worked out whether these measure resulted in a reduction in committee cases, or reduction in deferments (maybe thats the word?) and what impact any such reductions would have had. In the absence of such figures I will choose to assume that I made a difference in some way.

The actual performance, the bottom line, can be seen here in the table of improved authorities.

In the last year I chaired DC the percentage of major decisions taken within 13 weeks increased from 42.1% to 60.7% and in last year this went up again to 68.1%.

Overall perfomance went up from 54.5% in the year ending Mar 2003 to 88.4% in the year ending Mar 2005. Its quite an achievement, and if only a couple of those percentage points are down to changes I made I’ll be happy.

In this table you can see Crawley ranked at number 93 for major decisions, at number 23 for minor decisions and at number 40 for other desions out of 362 authorities. So that is at about the 75th percentile for major decisions, and even better for the rest. Our old performance would have put us at number 312 out of 362 for major decisions!

That is a huge improvement which probably merits a bit more than 3 column-inches in the Crawley Observer!

I have had reasons to go to a couple of DC meetings this year, and it did seem like there were far fewer ‘trivial’ decisions to be made, so that new scheme of delegation seems to be working. (I use the word ‘trivial’ with care. No planning application is trivial to the person making it or his neighbour who is affected by it – thats the first thing I learnt at the planning course I went on at Oxford Brookes when I first took the chair. I just mean applications for small extensions, porches, etc. where there were no grounds for the committee to go against the officers’ recommendations. We used to spend the second half of the meeting just nodding things through, which was embarrassing.).

There were still a couple of cases deferred, so there is still some room for improvement. In one case it was so the applicant could make changes which would hopefully lead to a changed recommendation. In that case really the committee should have refused and let them re-apply with a revised scheme. But at the moment the committee can afford to save the applicant a second application fee at the expense of 1% or 2% on their performance, but they ought not to make a habit of it. Even better would be if such delays, which are at the applicant’s request, could be removed from the statistics. Thats how we handle things at work.