Sustainable Drainage Technical Support

Under the Town and Country Planning Act, the County Council performs two statutory consultee roles, namely the Lead Local Flood Authority and the Highway Authority. To ensure that the County Council is able to appropriately discharge these roles and ensure that planning authorities are able to make timely decisions on planning applications and meet Government set performance targets, it is essential that the two teams that perform these roles are appropriately resourced. What has become apparent over the past 12-15 months is that the absence of up-to-date Local Plans in most planning authority areas, coupled with high housing delivery/need targets, has led to a significant increase in applications and pre-application enquiries for residential schemes that have not already been allocated in Local Plans. With this taken into account, it has been recommended that two additional roles be created and recruited into in the Flood Risk Management team, to primarily consider and respond to planning consultations. The team have tried recruiting into the roles via the standard recruitment processes within the authority, both via HR and through the Temporary Resources contract, on a number of occasions, none of which have been successful. As such, they are now seeking to recruit via the external consultancy market in order to fill the roles.