Here at St.Helens Council we have been running a DTA service for over 3 years. Our DTA followed an agreement at Chief Officer level committing each service to support the DTA. Following the commitment the DTA Co-ordinator then approached each internal service provider (the key officer) to ensure that they were committed to DTA. We regularly undertake surveys of the users and everyone provides very positive feedback. We have expanded the DTA to include external consultees as well such as EA and our other Environmental / Ecology consultees. We do it slightly differently and employ a part time DTA Co-ordinator who is responsible for arranging the DTAs, getting all the Officers to the meetings and making sure we have sight of the plans before the meeting (where we can), we also provide bullet point summaries of the meetings (the developers did not want lengthy minutes so we provide bullet points instead). The key isue for me is that we use DTA to promote the use of our BC service and have secured significant BC schemes which we would usually have lost to an Approved Inspector. This additional income easily covers the cost of the part time post (approx 2 days a week). This is also a key part of "selling" the concept and the post to the Chief Officers and in particular the Head of Finance. Hope that this helps. If you need anymore information just let me know. I have attached our brochure for further information.
