Section 106: Guidance on the use of planning obligations for Welsh ...

• providing training to improve Planning Committee members’
understanding of the LPA’s obligations policy and their role and
responsibilities in implementing them.
Structuring LPA capacity
4.13 Some LPAs have chosen to provide a specialist S.<strong>106</strong> officer who deals
solely with the development and application of the LPA’s obligations
policies. A specialist officer can bring their day-to-day experience of
negotiating and agreeing obligations to focus on the development of
different aspects of planning obligations policy. A dedicated officer can
also be more able to ensure that the LPA’s obligations policies are applied
accurately and consistently across the full range of developments.
4.14 In some cases LPAs have found the adoption of a ‘One-Stop-Shop’
approach to obligations helpful in improving delivery. A One-Stop-Shop
approach can involve having a single point of contact responsible for
dealing with applicants and others in regards to an LPA’s obligations
policy and/or their application to individual developments. This approach
can make it easier for all the relevant stakeholders to have a single
contact point at any stage for advice on general planning obligations policy
and/or directly related to the proposal. The customer interface might be a
single planning officer (a specialised S.<strong>106</strong> officer) or a cross-authority
team, including legal services.
The project management approach
4.15 Some LPAs take a project management approach towards negotiating
and agreeing planning obligations in order better to manage the process,
and ensure that milestones and deadlines for processing are achieved.
This may involve drawing up a detailed project timetable at the outset of
each application, and setting out the different activities that need to take
place over the various stages by the parties and dates of the process to
ensure the obligations are agreed on time. By way of example, the Vale
of Glamorgan has published a Planning Obligations Service Standards
which sets out the details of service provision. See Appendix 2.
Clarifying the role of conditions and obligations
4.16 Both Circulars 35/95 on the use of conditions and 13/97 on obligations set
out that permission cannot be granted subject to a condition that the
developer enters into a planning obligation. Some LPAs have used
negatively worded (“Grampian”) planning conditions stating that
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