Issue - meetings

To consider the report on work planning.

The Chair said the Scrutiny Committee had developed a number of ideas at the training session that they could choose to look into in greater depth. He would prefer to focus on a smaller number of items so that the focus of the Committee’s work was quality rather than quantity.

Councillor Evans said that Councillors Criscione, Jones and himself had put together a proposal for the Committee to undertake a review of the Council’s current approach to and management of planning processes, including the appraisal, drafting, agreement, monitoring and enforcement of conditions and planning obligations associated with major planning applications.

Members noted that anindependent study had been commissioned to identify improvements to the Council’s processes for handling major planning applications. It was agreed that the Vice Chair and a representative of Councillor Criscione, Evans and Jones would meet to discuss whether there was merit in combining the work on these two projects.

Members discussed how the Committee might play a part in the review of the Council’s governance structure. It was decided to invite the Leader or the Deputy Leader of the Council to the next meeting to discuss what forum would lead this review and the role that it was envisaged that the Scrutiny Committee might play in this work.

The Committee agreed that it was unnecessary to hold the meeting scheduled for 31 July because this would not allow sufficient time for Members to carry out enough work on its projects. Instead the meeting could be moved to 31 October.

The Chair said that if Members had no objections, the Local Council Tax Support Scheme would be removed from the Work Programme as there was to be no change made to the Scheme for the upcoming year.

The meeting ended at 8.35.