© image courtesy of David Inverarity/City of Edinburgh Council.
Making Sense of Neighbour Notification Who should pay and how much? What if you can’t ‘find’ the neighbours? Nancy Jamieson, Group Leader, and Joan Walker, Process Manager, with City of Edinburgh Council tease out some of the dilemmas now facing planners. When Scottish Planning Authorities took over neighbour notification in August 2009 it was literally the culmination of years of debate on the subject. The proposal first appeared in the consultation document Getting Involved in Planning in 2001 and then again in the White Paper Your Place, Your Plan in 2003. In 2004, a Neighbour Notification Working Group was set up and its conclusions published in 2006. The 2006 Planning Act followed. Further consultation in January 2008 fleshed out the details and, finally, the Development Management Regulations later that year specified how the new system of neighbourhood notification should be operated. So, did we produce the perfect system after all that hard work? Were our concerns about implementation and resources justified?
Good in principle… On the one hand, it is recognised that giving planning authorities the role of carrying out neighbour notification is a good principle and that the basic process is reasonably straightforward and works well. Neighbours are only notified when we have a valid planning application with the correct description and so can make a more informed comment. However, there are some areas which are causing confusion and leading to different interpretations and lack of consistency between authorities. Here are a few examples: Firstly, there is the question of neighbouring land without premises
on which to serve notice. The legislation states that notices must be advertised. Fine, but what if the Council is the landowner? Or what if it is simply a shared piece of open space in a housing development? Do we really have to charge the applicant to put an advert in the paper? In Edinburgh, we take a commonsense approach and limit such adverts, but other authorities regularly advertise and charge the applicant.
Counting the cost What about the cost of neighbour notification? It is fair to say that councils signed up to the new responsibilities on the understanding that we would be properly resourced. In Edinburgh we estimated, as part of working group discussions, that it could cost around £80 per application: this takes into account staffing, ICT and administrative costs. However, the
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…there are some areas which are causing confusion and leading to different interpretations and lack of consistency between authorities.
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Secondly, there is the charging regime. This was not consulted upon and requires authorities to charge the actual cost of the advert, shared by all applicants. But what if there is only one application advertised? The applicant has to pay for the whole advert – quite costly. In Edinburgh, we have decided that a flat-rate fee is the only fair way that the system can be operated, and this is a view shared by many other authorities. Recovery of fees can also be a problem for some authorities, although in Edinburgh this is not the case as our flat rate is quite low at £50. And thirdly, there is the issue of returned letters. The Regulations are silent on this, but has the notification actually been served if the letters are returned? In Edinburgh, about 25 letters per week are returned; a familiar picture throughout Scotland. On the plus side, this has allowed us to update our corporate address gazetteer.
actual figure is likely to be nearer £37 per application as, due to the downturn in the volume of applications, we have been able to absorb the tasks within the current staffing structure. This may change in the future as we come out of recession.
In search of solutions The latest news is that the Government is setting up a short-life working party to sort out these outstanding issues. This is a welcome step, but we hope a fundamental problem is addressed: if local developments are truly local, why do we need to notify everyone within 20m of the site? Proportionality seems to be a theme of the new Regulations but does not seem to apply to neighbour notification. The jury is therefore out, but with a bit of tweaking hopefully the neighbour notification system can be fixed. 07