Minutes:
The Leader made the following announcement:
The Leader had recently received a letter from the Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for MHCLG (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) highlighting changes to National Planning Policy and other Housing policies. The letter was at a high level, and further details would be forthcoming over the next few months. The key areas detailed were:
· Increases to planning fees and greater freedom for councils to set planning fees;
· Greater flexibilities in the use of Right to Buy receipts;
· Commitment to consult on wider reforms to Right To Buy eligibility and discounts;
· Changes to housing targets (this would affect many district councils however SHDC were currently, and had been for a few years, above target);
· More of a focus on councils giving planning permission than developers building out sites that have permission;
· Councils would need more powers and funding to address sites that sat empty, stalled and were not built out;
· The Government was retaining a brownfield-first approach;
· A strong focus on accelerating Local Plans;
· Reintroduction of Strategic Planning and Spatial Development Strategies (there was no policy detail available yet)
The Government had launched an 8-week consultation on the key changes, and the deadline for this was 24 September 2024. The Leader and the Planning Department would keep members updated on any further details as they emerged.
The Portfolio Holder for Health and Wellbeing, Conservation and Heritage and Tourism made a number of announcements:
· At SHDC, work was already underway on a carbon reduction plan which would outline the authority’s current baseline in terms of carbon emissions and set out how to reduce these as part of its net zero ambition. This was a useful exercise in helping to unlock future external funding opportunities to decarbonise operations and hopefully reduce operating costs at the same time.
· The Partnership’s Home Energy Advice and retrofit team had been nominated for an APSE (Association for Public Service Excellence) service award, for the best building and housing initiative. This was in recognition of the team’s performance in delivery of home upgrade grants for energy efficiency to local residents, as they were the top performer in the entire Midlands region in 2023/24.
· The start of SHDC’s programme of renovation and restoration of the war memorials in the Ayscoughfee Hall Gardens was announced. There had already been a thorough clean of both the WW1 Lutyens memorial and the stone of remembrance, and the more recent WW2 memorial. Work would shortly begin on repainting all of the names on both memorials (although the WW2 memorial’s names had never been painted, only incised and were currently difficult to read). In addition, sympathetic repairs would be undertaken to the wall and pillars of the original edifice using heritage stonemasons and craftsmen. This work would be carried out over the new few months and should be completed in the early part of next year.
The Portfolio Holder for Community Development announced that as part of ‘Love Your Parks Week’ the Communities Team had been travelling around the district promoting some of the activities available in local parks. Parks in Weston Hills and Crowland had already been visited with further visits in the week to be made to the Matthew Flinders Park in Donington and West Street, Long Sutton. The Portfolio Holder also advised that in Spalding, a ‘Bike Jam’ would be taking place on 20 August, at the Skate Park on Spalding Road.
The Portfolio Holder for Corporate, Governance and Communications responded that he had attended the event in Crowland which had been very well supported. He announced that a web-chat service had recently been launched which provided another method by which residents could contact Customer Services. This had been live for just over one month and to date, there had been just over 1000 interactions across the Partnership. Further details would follow and going forward, statistics would be reported as part of the quarterly performance report considered by the Performance Monitoring Panel.