Officers can take enforcement action

By Elgan Hearn, Local Democracy Reporter

All planning officers are capable of taking enforcement action against people who flout the law, it has been confirmed.

At a Powys County Council meeting, planning officers revealed the information as they updated the councillors on a recent enforcement success in Llandrindod Wells.

Gwilym Davies, planning control manager, believes that these successes need to be highlighted to show they do enforce policy after recent criticism that has not taken action against people and companies.

At a previous meeting, committee solicitor, Colin Edwards, explained that the department “does not have any dedicated enforcement officers” any more.

Mr Davies wanted to clarify the issue and told the councillors that “all planning officers” were trained in enforcement.

He said: “We don’t have designated planning enforcement officers whose job is purely to do planning enforcement.

“What we do have is every single planning officer has a duty and enforcement workload. So we have got capacity within the team to do enforcement.”

Mr Davies told the committee that having dedicated officers to do enforcement work had stopped about four years ago.

Mr Davies said that since then “there has been training up of officers and we have started to see a number of enforcement notices and prosecutions increase and I think that is progress”.

He added: “What we need to do is a better job of getting the public to see this work. It’s a failing of the department at the moment. You don’t see the successful prosecutions or the enforcement work going on.”

Mr Davies pointed out that the department’s resources had been put under huge pressure with all the departure (applications) poultry units and public inquiries to deal with at the same time as “budget cuts”.

He added: “We are criticised for taking and not taking enforcement action. We cannot just prosecute people who are rich so that we can get our costs back, we have to make sure that everything is done in accordance to policy and take the relevant actions regardless of who they are against.”