Annual Monitoring Reports (AMRs) - any joy? - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

In my own personal view: 1 LAs have tended to do AMRs because they have to, initially driven by PDG 2 AMRs include useful information which members find helpful and which provide an up to date statistical portrait of a district 3 AMRs sit well within LDF suite of documents 4 AMRs are quite time consuming to prepare, often seen as a start and finish rather than continuous piece of work and may be rushed towards end of December deadline leaving gaps in information 5 The need for changing/improving monitoring systems within the planning service may be highlighted in AMRs but securing action on this area is difficult

It is telling that you have not asked us in the private sector what we think of AMRs. They are not just for the benefit of the local authority. How informative do we think they are? Are they well structured and easily readable? Are they concise or are they longer than they need to be? As you would expect some are a lot better than others usually reflecting our perception of the general level of competence in any particular council. Having said that the problem we have is that if we are to respond in any helpful way we would have to name individual councils.

Fair point. To clarify two things : our interest is both with "producers" and "consumers" of AMRs. After all, if the consumer can't find / can't understand / doesn't know the information exists, the whole exercise has been a waste of effort. Secondly, I think there is a way of having a view about the principles without necessarily naming & shaming individual councils. Certainly, a great place to start is with a good example. What's the best one you've seen ?

Mike from Wigan makes the point that AMRs are useful for Members, I agree with this, here at Tandridge we always take the AMR to the Planning Policy Committee for information. Members do appreciate this, afterall without the AMR would the effort be made to gather this key information in one place and let Members see it? It was helpful that the Government abandoned some of the less useful COIs after a year or two but there are still one or two where their value is doubtful.

I agree with the points made by Mike from Wigan. At the moment the AMR is a useful receptacle of plan information, but until we have a Core Strategy in place it won't reach its full potential. Sunderland is in discussion with Government Office to move production of its AMR to summer. This will have the benefits of linking with the North East RSS monitoring process and enable uptodate information for the previous financial year to be included - the December deadline leads to either rather old fy information being used or guestimates being made for the outturns for the remainder of the financial year.

Brianne, Hampshire County Council produces an AMR jointly with Portsmouth and Southampton cities and the New Forest National Park Authority. Happy to offer any advice. Paul (paul.prowting@hants.gov.uk)