Calderdale Council takes on more staff to deal with planning and enforcement complaints in district

Calderdale Council is starting to rebuild its planning enforcement team to strengthen the service and tackle issues including the length of time it takes to resolve complaints – a major cause of complaints to local councillors from the public.

Four new planning officers it is hoped will start work with the authority in the next few weeks will likely be working on planning enforcement, a council scrutiny meeting heard.

Calderdale’s Council’s lead Planning officer, Richard Seaman, told councillors that difficulties in recruiting staff remained a problem.

But two principal planning officers and two planning officers which have been recruited are earmarked for enforcement work, he said.

Councillor Victoria Porritt (Lab, Elland), who chairs the council’s Planning Committee, said complaints a year ago were mainly about how long it was taking for planning applications to be processed – but that had now changed.

“Now they are around frustrations of enforcement, their neighbours are doing things they shouldn’t be doing, and the stress that puts on people.

“I am pleased to see that being built back up – it is clearly insufficient at the moment,” she said.

Calderdale scrutiny councillors were discussing progress amid changes to its planning service.

Councillor Tina Benton (Con, Brighouse) asked about the volume of enforcement cases the council had, and if, even with the new officers, the service would be able to cope.

Mr Seaman recalled that in different times the council had an enforcement team consisting of a team leader, two senior planning officers and four planning officers.

Potentially locating all four of the new officers through enforcement would strengthen the service.

He said that Calderdale might get around 400 enforcement complaints a year, which varied in complexity, some taking months to resolve while others could be sorted by a few phone calls.

There were legal remedies and recently two successful prosecutions had taken place.

But sometimes the fines issued were disappointing, added Mr Seaman.

A Calderdale resident recently detailed an enforcement case to the Local Democracy Reporting Service which had so far taken four months.

Last year the council’s Cabinet acknowledged service problems were due in large part to staff cuts made over several years prior, as the authority balanced its budget.

Workload had increased over the same period with development of the draft Local Plan running alongside regular services.

In 2022-23, Cabinet had approved budget to hire staff, and make important technological changes.

Councillors heard that increased staffing and technological improvements were now seeing progress and Mr Seaman said there was now a clear plan in place, including embedding best practices, to build on this.

Recruitment remained high priority as having the numbers necessary to do the job was also the biggest risk factor.

Place Scrutiny Board Chair Coun Regan Dickenson (Con, Rastrick) said that it seemed to be a case of three steps forward and two steps back and was beginning to realise how frustrating that is for the council.