Planning shake-up for Bognor regeneration will cost £400,000

The rejigging of Arun District Council's planning section will cost the equivalent of a maximum 7.30 on the council tax bill for a band D property.

The changes were approved by councillors who agreed they were needed to enable the council to cope with the series of regeneration applications expected in the next couple of years.

The formal proposals from developers such as St Modwen will be detailed and run to hundreds of pages. They will have to be scrutinised by council officers to make sure the applications have been completed correctly and to see how the schemes compare to the council's planning policies.

A foretaste of the amount of work involved was shown in the Asda proposals for Oldlands Farm in January. The retailer prepared more than 900 pages for Arun to consider. The scale of the scheme means the plan has yet to be decided.

The wholesale redevelopment of the Regis Centre and Hothamton sites in central Bognor will involve more of the same for the council's planning department.

Cllr Norman Dingemans, in charge of Arun's regeneration work, said the re-organisation would ensure the large amount of work could be handled.

"This is a sensible move forward. Over the next three years, a large number of planning applications will start to come in for Bognor '“ and the same for Littlehampton in two-three years' time.

"Therefore, the council can't be seen to be the block in the regeneration process because we can't handle these major applications."

Cllr Ricky Bower, who heads the council's planning services, said the planning department was under strain because of its workload and the need to meet strict deadlines to decide applications.

"There's a difficulty in recruiting planning officers, and this is getting worse, especially in the south east.

"There is a morale problem in planning departments at this particular time. Part of the blame for that is with the government because it changes the planning processes and subverts planning processes we have put in place."

The 440,000 was a maximum cost of the changes by the years 2010/11, he stressed.

The changes have also been prompted by the imminent departure of the council's head of planning services, Howard Cheadle, which has provided the chance to update the structure of the department.

Arun's leader, Cllr Gill Brown, said: "We are, in effect, a victim of our own success and the workload is increasing across the board in terms of major applications at Bognor Regis and Littlehampton.

"This is as a result of years of hard work on the part of the council in seeking private sector investment in the district. It's important that we have the necessary permanent and qualified staff to be able to carry this forward.

'It is also important that barriers are not placed in the way of enabling satisfactory developments to proceed and we need to be fully involved in the preliminary discussions through to implementation in order to secure high design standards.

'Less than 50 per cent of the money we are talking about is coming from our balances. The rest is in our budget. 7.30 is not going to be added to peoples' council tax.'

She explained that the figure had to be calculated under government rules to let residents know how council spending affected them.

But Cllr Dr James Walsh called the cash request a con because he believed it should have been added to this year's council tax demands for residents.

'This is a scandal. This situation was foreseen and known about before the budget. The money should have been in the budget,' he said.

Cllr Tony Squires stated: 'This is all about using up reserves so the council tax bill doesn't have to go up.'