Agenda and draft minutes

Please note this meeting may be filmed or recorded by the Council for live or subsequent broadcast via the Council’s internet site or by anyone attending the meeting using any communication method.  Members of the public participating in the meeting (e.g. making deputations, asking questions, making oral protests) should be aware that they are likely to be filmed, recorded or reported on.  By entering the ‘meeting room’, you are consenting to being filmed and to the possible use of those images and sound recordings.

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The Chair referred to the notice of filming at meetings and this information was noted.

To receive any apologies for absence.

Apologies had been received from Councillor Scott Emery and Councillor Imine Ibrahim.

The Chair will consider the admission of any late items of urgent business.  (Late items will be considered under the agenda item where they appear. New items will be dealt with under item 8 below).

There were no items of urgent business.

There were no declarations of interest.

To consider any requests received in accordance with Part 4, Section B, paragraph 29 of the Council’s constitution

There were none.

To confirm and sign the minutes of the Strategic Planning Committee meeting held on 19^th February as a correct record.

RESOLVED

To confirm and sign the minutes of the Strategic Planning Committee held on 19 February 2024 as a correct record.

A report on the work of the Planning and Building Control services to March 2024.

Mr Robbie McNaugher Head of Development Management & Enforcement, introduced the report in relation to performance overview.

The meeting heard that:

·           Decisions categorised as “excluded” from the figures were things like tree preservation orders and tree works in conservation areas. These were not monitored by the Government. Decisions on enforcement complaints not made within eight weeks were likely to have decisions made outside of the Haringey target, but sometimes it was just a case of data cleansing. Officers would sometimes do these in batches so it did not mean that decisions would be made out of time, but could do so.

·           Referring all Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs) to planning hasve become an aspect of the licensing process to ensure planning permission was in place. In the past, cases were only referred where there was a suspicion of no planning permission. All renewals were being submitted which allowed Planning to check the occupancy level. More investigation would be done if significant discrepancies were observed upon initial observation.

·           It was generally the case that when somebody applied for a HMO licence, they also had to apply for planning permission. There was an Article 4 Direction which had excluded permitted development rights for HMOs in the east of the borough. This meant that the majority of HMOs needed planning permission. Outside of that area, it would be possible to convert a house to a ‘small HMO’

·           Applications at Haringey worked similar to a taxi rank system. Once submitted, they would be allocated to an area where there was capacity within the team to consider them. Applications were taking, on average, 37 days to allocate. This had been reduced to 19. The manager was checking for previous history to make sure that if an officer had previously dealt with an application, the respective officer would be given the second application or whatever other kind of follow-up there was in relation to the application. 

·           Other councils operated a shorter validation process, but the approach at Haringey was to “front load” things, which may cause a delay at the start for validation, but it would still result in overall targets being hit as screening would be done in detail early in the process.

·           A query was raised regarding how some councillors had been made aware that the local plan was moving to change the allocation of new housing which had been set in the past to ensure that more social housing was built in the west and the east and that this was no longer the case. Several councillors were not supportive of or aware that this change had been made. In response, the meeting heard that the current policy sought the same target percentage of affordable housing across the entire borough (40%). In relation to the new local plan, no decision had been taken yet. Based on discussions so far, the Council was not proposing to set a different housing target in different parts of the borough in terms of the target of affordable housing  ...  view the full minutes text for item 7.

There were no new items of urgent business.

To note the date of the next meeting is 17^th October.

The next meeting would take place on 17 October 2024.