Town and parish Councils are going to have to pay more towards stopping Isle of Wight developers and others breaking planning rules.
Meanwhile, the Isle of Wight Council will step back on policing the finer details and concentrate on its core planning responsibilities as a new enforcement strategy is approved.
County Hall says it has struggled to close complaints about planning breaches recently, due to not having enough staff and an increase in caseloads.
The Isle of Wight Council was told to look at its planning enforcement strategy after a peer review by the Local Government Association. It also said town and parish councils’ expectations of planning enforcement were not being met.
A total of 1,253 new enforcement cases have been opened since 2018, with 1,234 of those closed.
Speaking at cabinet, Cllr Debbie Andre said planning enforcement was a high priority for a lot of wards across the Island and encouraging collaboration is important with town, parish and community councils who know where the troubles are.
The key priorities officers will now respond to Island-wide, include incidents which cause significant or irreparable harm to listed buildings, protected landscapes or protected trees.
They will also investigate other issues outside those priorities when resources allow it but there is no cash to expand enforcement resources. If a town, parish or community council want local priorities dealt with, they will fund further capacity and enforcement could become proactive, instead of the typical reactive response.
The approach has been trialled in Newport and Carisbrooke, and the Isle of Wight Council has said it is considered to be positive and successful. The authority says it is not about passing the enforcement responsibilities to local councils but introducing a more collaborative approach.
It is also the Council’s intention to publish real-time performance statistics regarding how long investigations are taking. The strategy also sets out what is or is not a breach of planning and a step-by-step guide to planning enforcement investigations.
Obviously they don’t know what proactive and reactive really mean!
They will be asking for volunteers next to stand outside building sites with a crystal ball being proactive
Yes very proactive to say you don’t have enough cash to enforce everything.
The best thing would be to look into developments holistically.
You build 100 houses? Great! But you must also build GP there, and work with council to hire NHS staff (maybe tempt them with a discounted house?), and place for a butcher, a bakery and so on. This way you can build on brownfields away from current city centres but still provide 80% of what people near very close thus creating less congestion. And then add bus stops, coordinate with Vectis, expand existing roads, pavements and bike routes to reach your development, and so on.
Holistic approach however usually requires some competency from central government because local councils often lack funds and/or powers. “Levelling up” should provide that support… theoretically.
All very good but isn’t that what ” Town and Country Planning ” is supposed to do anyway ?. Might be worth the government investing in an indepth investigation into the planning system and it’s operatives and how they approach town planning – seems to me they are currently failing in many respects.
Shame Claire mosdell got away with planning permission but she’s a so called councillor so it doesn’t apply to her.
I’m a pot head can do what I want
1 rule for them and 1 rule for us.
So the council planning department claim that they haven’t got the resources to do their job. The article states that: “The key priorities officers will now respond to Island-wide, include incidents which cause significant or irreparable harm to listed buildings, protected landscapes or protected trees. They will also investigate other issues outside those priorities when resources allow it but there is no cash to expand enforcement resources.”
Evidently, they have closed all but 19 enforcement cases out of 1253, which sounds pretty good. What is the problem? Insufficient time to drink coffee perhaps? What a load of nonsense. Get on with your jobs and stop moaning.
Might be a good idea if they sack half the workforce and reduce our Council Tax.
Obviously passing the problems down to town and parish councils, as usual, despite it being a mandatory activity. Just like Whitehall passing detail activities down to the devolved governments for Scotland, Wales and NI. Central Government used to run an empire, now they’d be hard pushed to run a fish and chip shop. (With apologies to those running successful fish and chip shops)
So in the meantime developers and or whoever have carte blanche to carry on regardless of rules and or damage to infrastructure or environment
Town and parish Councils are going to have to pay more towards stopping Isle of Wight developers and others breaking planning rules. So will the developers and others refund the costs when found guilty??
How much does it cost to say NO?