Issue - meetings

The Committee will be asked  to agree to the proposed restructuring of the Planning Regeneration and Economy Service (PRE) following formal consultation with staff and their Trade Unions. Report to follow

The Assistant Director of Planning, Regeneration, and Economy introduced the report which set out the restructuring of his service. A previous report   with the principle of the restructure had been agreed by the General Purposes committee in October 2010.  Following consultation and further additional consideration been given to  the  Rethinking Haringey report ,restructure of urban environment , and work on shared economy service with Waltham forest(the subject of a separate report)   there would be a reduction of 38 posts. This would be through a deletion of 17 vacant posts, 12 posts through voluntary redundancy, leaving a final reduction of 9 posts. The PRE structure would consist of the following services:

• Building control
• Carbon Management and Sustainability service
• Development Management and Planning Enforcement
• Shared Economic service with Waltham Forest
• Business development and business support.

The service would take on planning enforcement and there would not be a reduction to posts in this related area.  It was envisaged that there would be a proactive approach to planning enforcement   taken by the planning part of the service with this seeing Development management and planning enforcement reintegrated. There would be 9 planning officers allocated to dealing with planning applications and 3 with enforcements. However, as part of the  new generic way of working for the service all the planning  officers would be expected to deal with applications, enforcement and the tasks that would accompany these such as appeals, letters, public consultation, guidance to applicants and presentations to committees. The planning officers would  work across  the geographical areas of the council to  help build up a wide know ledge of areas  but they would  also in future  be given responsibility for certain areas of the borough  as part of the emerging proposals for Area Committees and Area Forums.

Some members of the committee which had not been on the membership of the General Purposes Committee, when an earlier report on this restructure had been considered, sought an understanding of how the proposals for the restructure of the service had been developed and further pointed to the number of responses in the consultation to the restructure which did not correlate to any real change to the restructure. In answer to these questions, the assistant director for planning, regeneration and economy explained that  following the initial report to Committee in October the service had further been required to seek further savings as part of the Urban Environment restructure, they had looked at having a more efficient base for the service and including Local Development Framework .It had also been necessary to  examine the staff that were currently in disparate teams before proposals could be finalised and consulted on. Previous to this there had been discussion with all the teams on the planned restructure of the service dating back 2 years.  This had helped ensure that the final restructure proposals were acceptable to staff.  Most of the queries received from the consultation were noted to be questions about the restructure and not disagreement with it. These were answered  ...  view the full minutes text for item 15