v1.2Cornwall Council

Planning Agents’Customer Focus Panel

Wednesday24July 2013 – 14:00

Room 2N:02, County Hall, Truro

Attendees: / Pat Whymer – Laurence Associates / Simon Jones – Lipscomb Jones
Russell Dodge – Business Location Services / David Stein – Acorn
Nigel Doyle (ND) – Cornwall Council / Carly Fitzpatrick – Cornwall Council

Notes of the meeting

These notes and links to other useful information are available on our website at

1Introduction and welcome

Nigel Doyle, Assistant Head of Planning, Housing and Regeneration, welcomed the group and explained that the panel had been formedas a result of discussions that had taken place at the Agents’ Forum in February and that the aim of the session was to find out what agents’ experiences are in order to make improvements and ensure consistency in the pre-application and Planning Performance Agreement processes.

2Planning Performance Agreements Service

Action
  • Planning Performance Agreements (PPAs) were not great from the start but are now improving.
  • A PPA takes some of the risks out of the planning process and can help save on contingency budget.
  • The benefits of a PPA need to be explained.
  • The key to a successful PPA is setting realistic milestones.
  • On a major project having a PPA can save between four and six months. For some of the renewable energy clients this has saved millions of pounds because they managed to gain an approval in time to meet deadlines for the feed-in tariff.
  • For a PPA to work everyone involved has to perform – the whole process can be held up by just one person failing to respond.
  • When using a PPA the Council need to ensure that a planning officer with relevant experience is assigned.
  • Agents can ask for a specific officer to deal with their PPA but must be mindful of any conflict of interest and other workload.
  • For a PPA which covers a number of applications across the County it may be difficult to have the same officer for all of the applications, but it would be good to have one key contact who the agent can have as a single point of contact i.e. Group Leader.
  • PPAs can be used even for quite small applications if ongoing discussions are required rather than a single piece of pre-application advice, this could be particularly useful for small but controversial applications.
  • Agents have experienced problems with varying behaviour between planning officers – some officers are outstanding and others are not so good.
  • When using a PPA more and more information is being asked for at the pre-app stage and there can be large costs involved with this.
  • One agent has experienced problems getting a PPA up and running because senior officers did not know who should deal with it. Nigel advised that if this occurs in the future the matter should be escalated to their line manager i.e Group Leader (see Team Contact Details for more info). The guidance on how to set up a PPA needs to be expanded to include minimum information requirements and a list of who to send the initial enquiry to.
  • Some clarity is needed around the payment process as this is not clear in the guidance. Nigel stated that in the future Cornwall Council hope to have a menu of services that agents could choose from depending on the size of development and how much they want to spend. The invoicing process needs to be made clearer.
  • Other services within Cornwall Council may charge for their advice in the future but agents will be able to choose if they want to pay for this advice or not.
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3Pre-application Advice Service

Action
  • Agents like to have the same officer through to the planning application process as different officers can have different opinions on the same application.
  • Why is there a fee to submit a pre-app for ListedBuilding consent? There is no fee to submit the application so why would anyone pay for a pre-app, they would just submit the application and treat that as the pre-app.
  • Recently there have been problems when using the pre-app service because the officer has taken the proposal to ‘quality circle’ before the site meeting and has formed an opinion before looking at the site or speaking to the agent
  • A dedicated pre-app team is one idea but it depends who is in the team and the benefits of continuity to the application stage need to be retained.
  • Divisional members need educating on what a pre-app means.
  • When the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) is brought into force clients in Truro may have to pay up to £15,000 for a 150sqm extension and yet there is no pre-application advice available for these sorts of applications. Perhaps there could be pre-apps for extensions over 100sqm or more than 50% of the footprint of the original building.
  • Surgeries offering a duty planner type service would not be very useful to agents, maybe more so for members of the public. Agents would rather see these resources used for formal pre-apps rather than informal advice surgeries.
  • There is mixed opinion on whether informal discussions with officers before a pre-app is submitted would be helpful or not. Some people will abuse this service and use it as a pre-app.
  • For planning agents or developers with a known work programme it would be useful to meet with a group leader periodically to let the Council know what sort of work is coming through to help manage the process. This would save time and money.
  • Why does it take 10 days to validate a pre-app? This is worded incorrectly in the advice; it shouldn’t take 10 days to validate a pre-app. The advice is meant to imply that a meeting will be set up within 10 days.
  • It takes too long to get a decision on a pre-app which makes it difficult to sell the service to clients.
  • Why do pre-application responses contain pages of standard text which just lists policies? Agents would prefer more tailored advice.
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4Agents’ Area of the Website

Action
  • Agents’ area is a good idea but needs to include:
  • A library of information
  • S106 templates
  • Fee documents
  • Applications forms
  • Any relevant news/procedure/documents
  • Link to affordable housing need website
  • Policy updates
  • FAQs – to provided the same answer for everybody
  • The page needs to be available on the navigation tree and also to search for.
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5Any other business

Action
  • Simon Jones mentioned that the Construction Design and Management Regulations states that if a planning officer becomes part of the design process then they can become liable if someone were to hurt themselves on site because of a particular design feature that the planning officer had recommended. Nigel agreed to take this matter to the Health and Safety Implementation Group and report back.
  • Agents mentioned the use of a standard condition requiring materials samples to be submitted prior to commencement and asked if planning officer could avoid using this as a matter of course because often materials don’t need to be submitted prior to commencement. Also the over use of a standard landscaping condition is a problem because the detail is required before commencement. Essentially officers need to check that conditions make sense on each application rather than just applying the same standard conditions to everything.
  • Affordable Housing requirements on small schemes are not viable.Officers/members need to look at development economics before asking for so much affordable housing. Small developers will not be able to survive – would recommend no affordable housing contribution for development with less than five dwellings. A time limited affordable housing policy was suggested.
  • Change of use from office to residential has recently become permitted development and Cornwall Council is not exempt from this. Agents will just need to submit prior notification for this type of development.
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Actions

1Pat Whymer to send details of problems that have occurred with identifying an officerfor a PPA to Nigel for investigation.

2CF to expand PPA guidance to give more detail on how to submit initial enquiry and who to send it to.

3ND to create a ‘menu’ of services that agents’ can buy to form a PPA. The guidance needs to be updated and payment methods made clearer.

4CF to feedback comments on pre-apps for ListedBuilding consent to the Historic Environment Service.

5ND to make sure officers know they shouldn’t form opinions on pre-apps before the meeting/site visit.

6ND to look into making pre-application advice available for extensions over 100sqm or more than 50% of the footprint of the original building.

7CF to publicise the fact that Group Leaders are willing to discuss annual work programme with agents and developers.

8CF to amend the wording of the pre-app guidance note and specifically the section that refers to 10 day validation time.

9ND to look at how pre-app decisions can be reached quicker to encourage more people to use the service.

10CF to see how standard templates of pre-application responses can be amended to include less standard text and more tailored advice.

11CF to make changes to Planning Agents’ webpage and publicise.

12ND to take ‘liability if a planning officer recommends a particular design’ to Health and Safety Implementation Group.

13ND to raise the issue of planning conditions particularly the standard materials condition, landscaping condition and timing of the conditions with the Group Leaders.

14ND to take affordable housing issues linked with development viability to the Planning Policy Team and Dick Cole CC, chairman of the Environment, Heritage and Planning Portfolio Advisory Committee

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