Employment Land Monitoring and UCO 2021 - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

We've chosen to continue reporting against the old codes. You lose so much detail if you take account of the changes. We can easily report on E alongside of that if pushed, but i can't imagine a scenario where you'd be more interested in the new UCOs as opposed the former.

Like many LPAs we don't have a dedicated monitoring officer. With so few of us in planning policy and so little time, rightly or wrongly, we have taken the same approach as Jonathan Tedray (above). If we are required to report anything about Class E we will deal with such a request when it arises.

For continuity with data going back many years, we are also doing the same when recording the occupany and vacanacy of units in our town centres, for now at least.

Hi Helen - yes it is a bit of a nuisance that the coding has changed and that some development now can happen without coming through planning! My response is more technical than policy related - not sure if that is what you need but here goes!

It depends what you need to monitor in the first place - we have AMR indicators on Employment Land, Employment completions, and town centre development that help us montior certain LP policies. And these indicators are based on the national core output indicators that used to be a requirement for all LAs in the past (doesn't feel that long ago to me but might be 10 years!)

So I have had to amend my queries to pull out the new codes where schemes are still coming through the planning system, and I do pull out Prior Notifications as well as full planning applications (we use Idox Uniform in Planning and Building Control, here). If schemes are happening through GPDO without any Prior Notifications, we will not see them and will not monitor. Does that help?