Providing a high quality planning advice service is crucial to ensuring the service is well resourced and able to continue working with applicants and their agents in a proactive and enabling way. While we are regularly praised for our approach, and our express and fast-track services have been popular, the recent Peer Challenge Report recognised that we can improve our commercial offer to customers.
We also recognise that the level of service in some cases has not met expectations, and this has led to some choosing not to use our services. Some of this has been due to low staff levels, but there are also issues with process and approach that we know need to change. To address this, we carried out a review of our services firstly through an introspective review with officers and consultees within the council, then with service users.
We held a workshop with agents on 13 March this year and, by analysing our service in terms of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT), we found that advice was of a good quality and the broad approach was to be proactive and helpful. It was noted that planning performance agreements resulted in an enhanced service.
However, we found several issues that we need to address to ensure planning advice services remain attractive to agents and applicants. In response, we have developed an action plan for improvement which will ensure our service provides good value for money and meets expectations.
We have recently launched a new streamlined planning advice portal for our pre-application, fast-track and other planning advice services. We have also increased staff levels to allow us to enhance our planning advice services. This and other improvements will enable us to meet the expectations of our users, and provide a higher quality service going forward.
We hope our commitment to improvement will encourage you to continue to use our planning advice services.