Agenda item

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 close to the closure date of consultation.

Understanding was sought on the reasoning behind the reduction of 8 physical regeneration posts and how this would work in the new Carbon management and sustainability service. It was noted that the Planning officers taking on these duties would be efficiently deployed across the borough to enable their expertise to be fully utilised.

In answer to how the service would combat the reduction in funding income, there were new government funding initiatives to be announced in October 2011which the council would compete for.  They would also further utilise on the partnership around regeneration projects to seek funding.

Justification was sought for the SM graded posts which was to cover Business Development and Technical support. Members note that this manager was not solely managing back office functions but would deal with frontline technical staff.

Council will deal with developments which are not adhering to planning policy or those developers which will seek to get through the planning process at whatever cost and without real regard to council’s overall planning policies, as part of the generic job descriptions there would be a reliance on planning policy knowledge and together with enforcement duties this will help meet these challenges. Also as part of working in the Area committee and forum structure the planners will build knowledge of the issues in particular areas and will enable them to be in a better position to understand pre application issues.

The rational for adding building control to the structure was sought as previously his had been separated from development management. It was noted that this was in keeping with the aspiration for the service to distribute an enforcement workload.

 In considering this report and the forthcoming report on the shared economy service with Waltham Forest , comment was made on whether a shared Planning & Regeneration  service was being  likely to be looked at in future and whether this restructure had been completed with this in mind? . There were a list of shared projects currently being investigated fro shared service with Waltham Forest but this did not include planning. It had previously been signalled that there was the potential to look at developmental management, technical control, and planning control as areas of shared service but this was not a current project.  There further followed some discussion  on how much had been communicated about the  councils plans for shared services , what projects were being taken forward, who would be delivering these services,  the communication and working process with Waltham forest council to develop  these shared service proposals.  To further elucidate on the issues raised it was agreed that there should be an update report back to the next Corporate Committee on the shared services.

The equalities impact statement which described that the impact of the restructure on ethnic groups of staff as not significant was contended with.  It was felt that this statement could not be made until the recruitment process was complete and the full impact on certain ethnic groups known. It was noted that the EQIA completed  on a restructure is to identify the impacts on  Black and Ethnic groups of staff going forward and not meant to be a final conclusion on  impact of the restructure on BME groups. In response it was noted that the  equalities team had  approved the Equalities impact assessment .The  judgement that  there was  felt not to be a significant impact on a particular group  was taken from the calculation  that if in all the ring fences and vacancies all BME staff were unsuccessful then this could drop the  percentage of staff from 37% to 32%. It was accepted that this could be subject of  disagreement and minor clarifications would be made to the EQIA to reflect the points raised in the discussion.

RESOLVED

1. That the responses to the formal consultation and the management responses to these be noted.

2. That the final restructuring proposal be approved.

3. It be noted that  the two phases of recruitment will be: phase one July (recruit to management and assimilations) phase to October 2011 (recruit to Carbon management and Sustainability service and  completion of recruitment in all other teams).

4. That the amalgamation of environmental resources,  transport planning, housing enabling fuel poverty teams together with the existing physical regeneration and policy teams to form a Carbon Management and Sustainability  group be noted.

5. That the amalgamation of the Planning Enforcement function with Development Management be noted.

6. That the impending formation of a shared economic development group with Waltham Forest , which was subject of the separate restructure to the Planning , Regeneration and Economy (PRE)restructure , but would be positioned in the PRE service.