Using the private sector to support development control can dramatically improve performance. It can also help maintain performance levels at times of service disruption. Planning consultants can: focus on the task in hand and also provide extra support at short notice.
User experience
Where some councils have used consultants to support development control, the user experience has suffered. There are two reasons for this: limited access to case files for public inspection (because the file is with the consultant); and reduced contact between members of the public and the consultant. Both issues can be overcome by the effective use of technology. Increasingly, councils are scanning plans attached to planning applications onto their computer systems. Where this happens, users can inspect the plans at the council offices or via the internet. Some councils have gone a stage further and scan consultation responses and third party letters onto their systems. This means that users can view the original application and assess its progress, regardless of the location of the hard copy file.
In relation to contact between the user and the consultant, there is no reason why a direct dial number or email address for the consultant cannot be provided on communications sent out relating to the application. This reflects good practice where councils provide direct contact details for in-house case officers. Of course users may find it more difficult to arrange meetings with consultants that are based outside the council area. However, in some cases, the use of private firms has improved the user experience, with consultants meeting with applicants and neighbours at times and locations convenient to the users.
Client contact
It is important that consultants have one point of contact within the council, providing clear instruction. In Southampton City Council this takes the form of their planning agreements officer, in Birmingham City Council, the appeals administrator and in Redditch Borough Council, the head of development control. It is the role of each of these individuals to coordinate and check that the consultants deliver under the terms of the contract. This does not represent an additional burden on the council as development control managers have to check the quality and timeliness of planning recommendations, appeal statements and legal agreements regardless of whether they are produced in-house or by consultants.
Quality assurance
The quality checks that councils build into development control mean that there is no reason why consultant support should not slot directly into the council's existing systems. Typically, once a council has validated an application, the file is passed to a planning officer to visit the site, negotiate with the applicant, as appropriate, and reach a recommendation. The case is then discussed with the team leader and, in the case of delegated items, a decision notice is issued. The process is exactly the same for an application dealt with by a consultant, with the consultant taking the role of the planning officer.
Councils should resist the temptation to build in additional controls where a private firm is engaged. This can negate any efficiency gains. For example, for some time a district council has been using external solicitors to produce legal agreements attached to planning permissions. The council's in-house solicitors insisted that all instruction to the external solicitors should be through them rather than directly from planning officers. This resulted in a bottleneck in the process, duplication of effort and undermined communication between council planners and the external solicitors. Because the council insisted on this process, the use of external solicitors did not provide additional capacity nor did it reduce the time taken to issue decision notices where a legal agreement was involved.
Informed client and contract arrangement
Where councils buy in extra capacity to help with routine planning applications and appeals, they have the existing knowledge and skills to act as the informed client. In addition, councils can easily monitor the performance of the consultant, by checking the timeliness and quality of the work as planning decisions on applications are reached. The contract should set out minimum targets for the time taken to deal with applications and stipulate the terms under which the council can terminate the contract. The ongoing nature of the work means that councils can identify and act on poor performance prior to the council incurring undue abortive cost.
Conflict of interest
In using external support the council has to be aware of potential conflict of interest. Our study showed that the councils using external consultants required them to declare any conflicts of interest when processing planning applications and appeals. This is no different from councillors declaring an interest and therefore not voting on a planning application. However, it is advisable, prior to any contract being agreed, for the council and the consultant to discuss the levels of private work that the consultant undertakes in the council's area and, based on this, decide whether the firm can realistically provide development control services to the council. However, we stress the fact that in all cases it is the council that remains the planning authority and issues the decisions. This can either take the form of a) a consultant's report to committee, where councillors take the decision, or b) a consultant can prepare a recommendation and a planner, directly employed by the council, makes the decision under delegated powers.
hen to use consultants
In the past, councils have used consultants to provide additional capacity at times of high workload. However, councils have observed that over recent years the level of workload has been 'all peak with no trough'. In the light of this increasing workload, externally driven factors such as planning application numbers do not provide a good indicator of when to use external help. Instead, councils should assess their internal capacity to deliver the development control service as a gauge to involving the private sector. For example, the council may be planning to introduce a new ICT system that may affect delivery capacity by taking planners out for training. Here, using consultants to cover the period of training could prevent a dip in performance. Similarly, the service may wish to use private sector capacity to cover maternity/paternity leave or study leave.
How to deal with contentious cases
The majority of householder planning applications follow a prescribed process within timescales that councils can clearly identify in advance. These non-contentious applications are straightforward to outsource to external firms, partly because it is easy to agree a fee. This arrangement frees up time for in-house staff to focus on the locally contentious or more complex schemes. Since it is usually possible to identify at the outset of the process whether a scheme is likely to be contentious (based on the type of scheme proposed and local knowledge of individual neighbourhoods) the council should be able to filter off those applications which would be more appropriately dealt with in-house. But, inevitably, there will be times where these more complex applications are dealt with by consultants. It can be difficult to determine how long these will take to process and they will often involve additional input from the consultants. This makes costing these applications difficult. There are two ways of dealing with this. First, if the consultant has sufficient volume of work from the council, they can offset this additional work against their overall margins. The second is for the council and consultant to agree additional payment on a case-by-case basis for those contentious applications that require greater time input.
Value for money
A key issue in appointing consultants to process planning applications is whether it represents a cost effective solution. Can consultants provide development control services at lower cost?
The study has identified that private sector consultants can deal with planning applications for a set fee that is less than the national householder planning application fee of £135. It therefore can often be a cost effective approach for councils. However, this assessment comes with two provisos. First, some applications will inevitably take more time to deal with and will require additional input that takes them outside the pre-agreed fee (See: How to deal with contentious cases). Second, the councils we visited themselves retain key parts of the process in-house. For example, they register the application, carry out initial consultation prior to handing the application to the consultant and issue the planning decision at the end of the process. There is clearly a cost associated with this administration that the council rather than the consultant bears. However, very few councils capture data on the cost of dealing with a planning application in-house. Until this is available it is difficult to assess the relative cost effectiveness of external provision.