Making the invisible visible: Understanding Bolton's planning pressures

Bolton Council’s planning service was going through challenging times. Some stakeholders for the service did not understand what was causing the slow, poor service that was being reported by their customers, because they held high regard for the team’s professionalism. And at the same time, they heard that the people working in the service were feeling isolated and unsupported. 

 

Something wasn’t adding up. The stakeholders heard that the service was not handling more applications per officer than in neighbouring boroughs. But the pace and quality of service that was reported by customers and residents was not as quick or good than in neighbouring boroughs. 

 

 

The DM team had more work-in-progress than is necessary for the rate at which they received new work, and too little current capacity to reduce it to the level it should be. This inflated work-in-progress led to high failure demand and lower productivity and has helped lock the team into a long-term imbalance between workload and capacity. 

 

Many of the team felt their concerns were unheard and felt unsupported. Despite strong public service motivation, many had lost faith that things can be better, and had become resigned to their part in service failures. 

 

When we examined the imbalance of workload and capacity, we found with current process, productivity and systems: 

 

To address these issues would require 2 extra planners – the yearly cost to do that would be approximately £80,000 per year. 

 

To reduce WiP from current levels to a healthy 5-week position would require 6 extra planners over a 3-month period or 3 planners over 6 months - the one-off cost to do that with agency planners would be approximately £108,000. 

 

 

Remove ‘first responder for enforcement’ from planners role – they weren’t doing it anyway so it was sensible to recruit additional officers to fulfil that role 

 

Fast track for small schemes 

 

Unblocked barriers to high productivity in the planning support team so that ‘hidden’ work in progress for the planners was made clear. 

 

Then there was the implementation of new planning software that resulted in dramatic increase in work in progress whilst the data was migrated. 

 

Then we did some work to: 

 

Protect planners from Members enquiries – by seconding someone in to respond to Members from the Exec PA department 

 

Bring in short term process changes, like a rule to not allow amendments for a short time, to increase productivity 

 

De-allocated everything beyond the maximum capacity caseload to protect planners from failure demand on applications they didn’t have a hope of processing ‘the surplus caseload’ and communicated that approach to customers with the support of the council’s elected administration. Protect people from the impossible by advocating using the data. 

 

That change and the support from the members was the biggest driver of higher productivity – and was also the thing that no-one thought would change 

 

Bring in disciplined operational management to scrutinise and drive through any process changes that will increase wellbeing and efficiency 

 

 

When Lucy revisited the council, the team were excited to show her just how much had changed. The service felt different, the improvements were visible, and people were proud of the progress they had made. For Lucy, seeing how the changes she had helped put in place had continued to make a difference was a lovely reminder that improving a planning service isn’t just about better performance - it’s about creating an environment where people feel supported and able to do their best work.