Next month, Kirklees Council will be streamlining its planning process, with one committee to be axed and £100k to be saved each year.
The move will give council officers more responsibility for undertaking work around planning decisions, reducing the number of applications that will need to be decided by a planning committee.
The council currently has a Strategic Planning Committee and two Sub-Committees – one covering the Huddersfield area, meeting at Huddersfield Town Hall, and the other for the Heavy-Woollen area, meeting at Dewsbury Town Hall. However, the number of committees will soon be cut from three to two.
From February, the local authority will keep a Strategic Planning Committee to determine major planning applications, while a District-Wide Planning Committee will focus on minor and other (household) applications. Each committee will meet in Huddersfield Town Hall every six weeks.
Going forward, applications will only be decided at committee if they are a significant departure from the overall Kirklees Local Plan or if public opinion on a planning application is strongly against the officer’s recommendation.
Applications will also be decided by a committee if they have been referred by a ward councillor. In such cases, the relevant councillor will have to attend the meeting in person or send a ward colleague representative.
When the plans to change the planning system were approved, not all councillors were on board. Back at September’s Full Council meeting, Kirklees’ Green group voted against the plans and said they were not consulted, despite this being stated in a council report.
At the same meeting, the Lib Dems were vocal against the plans, also voting against them.
Cleckheaton ward councillor Andrew Pinnock told the meeting he was “totally opposed” to the plans, describing them as “undemocratic on all sorts of levels”. He added that a large proportion of the borough’s population would be excluded from the process, due to the committee meetings always being held in Huddersfield.
However, the council said that the current way of doing things had been criticised for its drawn-out process and it is hoped that the new model will encourage developers to consider sites in Kirklees and ensure that communities are actively involved in the planning process. The strategy also ties in with the full update to the Kirklees Local Plan, which was approved by the Full Council on 15 November.
In a recent statement, Cllr Graham Turner, Cabinet Member for Finance and Regeneration, said: “These changes sound small, but they will hopefully speed up our decision-making around planning applications of all sizes – at this stage simply by placing more responsibility with knowledgeable planning officers. In February we’ll also be streamlining our committees. And, crucially, we’ll still be making sure that local communities are involved in the process when an application matters to them.
“We have ambitious goals for regeneration across Kirklees, and that means we need to be doing all we can to encourage new planning applications – without sacrificing quality or public engagement. There are so many reasons, and we want to further improve our reputation as a good place to build and as a good local authority to partner with on development.
“We’re not only streamlining and modernising our approach to the planning system – we’ll also see some cost savings which will help us deliver a balanced budget in 2024.”
