West Northamptonshire Council staff left ill-equipped, leader admits

West Northamptonshire Council replaced Northamptonshire County Council after it was dissolved in 2021

Planning staff at a council were left "ill-equipped" and had "no sense of vision", a council leader has admitted.

West Northamptonshire Council's (WNC) leader Jonathan Nunn said some staff left its planning services before it was formally established in April 2021.

WNC replaced Northamptonshire County Council after it was dissolved in 2021.

A review found WNC's planning service did not have a clear picture of contributions which developers had been asked to make to help communities.

The Local Democracy Reporting Service said the peer review also found the planning service's performance was "not strong", was deteriorating and that a backlog of undetermined applications was rising.

Mr Nunn said: "It really frustrates me that we are where we should have been probably two years ago.

"I wholeheartedly accept that. In the interim period, we saw staff lost, partly because they didn't feel valued, partly because they were ill-equipped and weren't properly directed, motivated, they had no sense of vision or focus.

"I think we have all those things now."

He said the review, by the Local Government Association and its Planning Advisory Service, created a "political open goal" for the administration's opponents, but that it was "the right thing" to do.

WNC's cabinet member for planning, Rebecca Breese, said there was an "absolute acceptance" of the issues found. She told the meeting on Tuesday that while the planning system was not perfect, it has been "improving".

She said WNC's lack of ability to track developers' contributions was down to previous councils' reporting systems being "absolutely not up to scratch", which made merging documents more complicated.

She added no formal work into planning had been done by WNC's shadow authority ahead of April 2021, partly because of work over the Covid-19 pandemic taking priority.

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