Examination of Witnesses (Questions 640
- 644)
WEDNESDAY 9 JANUARY 2008
MR DAN
HAWTHORN, MR
KEVIN REID
AND MR
RYND SMITH
Q640 Chairman:
Mr Smith, what do you think about that?
Mr Smith: In broad terms, again
I would concur with that assessment. Good practice is becoming
disseminated. It is marching out across local government. I would,
for example, remark on the local authority network on drainage
and flood risk management, LANDFORM, a CIRIA initiative, which
is helping, but it will take time for every single local authority
in the land to be absolutely one hundred per cent up to speed.
They are going to need assistance, particularly in terms of the
data that is provided to them by the Environment Agency around
issues like flood risk identification and mapping. At the end
of the day, we are dealing with complex data here.
Q641 Chairman:
When you say that they will need assistance, where should they
get that from? I suppose what is at the back of my mind is a small
borough council with a limited planning capacity in an area under
a lot of pressure from a well financed series of developers, all
of whom have their environmental experts, all busy justifying
the developer's position, and the authority may only have the
advice of the Environment Agency to call on because they are now
a statutory consultee. They are a bit bereft of being able critically
to appraise the technical data which is coming at them. Is that
the area where there may be a deficit of expertise?
Mr Hawthorn: It is partly about
the training and resources that the planners have at their disposal;
it is partly about spatial planners learning to work better with
emergency planners to draw on the expertise which may be elsewhere
in the authority but which they have not yet tapped into.
Q642 Chairman:
Given that you may have small local authorities, again going back
to the experience in somewhere like Gloucestershire, authorities
with a limited resource at their disposal, do you have a recommendation
to put to the Committee as to how this information expertise deficit
could be solved realistically?
Mr Smith: This is creative thinking
on the hoof to some extent. One possible way forward—again
thinking of the mechanisms emerging in the Planning Bill, is the
concept of a community infrastructure levy that the Bill provides
for, whereby the cost implications of infrastructure requirements
for a locality will have to be identified in the local development
framework for that locality. Thinking literally on the hoof, it
might be possible, among the range of infrastructure goods identified
and costed for in that sort of levy plan, to have the cost of
actually providing the necessary technical advice, if it is not
already available through effective in-house mechanisms or through
agency or partnership working arrangements, so that in other words
a council would be able to say: yes, we need advice before this
application can proceed but we recognise that the cost of advice
is something that we are asking the applicant to contribute to
and we have a levy fund to help us buy that advice.
Q643 Chairman:
In other words, a potential developer might have to put some money
up-front to the authority to enable them to buy specific expertise
to deal with an application that could potentially have a flood
implication?
Mr Smith: Yes, and that would
be fairly apportioned out across the many—
Mr Hawthorn: The data that comes
before that is the local authority having carried out its flood
risk assessment so that the developments that have that risk as
it were trigger that process by hooking in on the map.
Q644 Chairman:
Mr Reid, I cut you off earlier, is there more?
Mr Reid: I only wanted to say
that the main source for that expertise at the minute for both
local authorities and for ourselves is to go to the Environment
Agency. Clearly that organisation has limits on its own resources.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed
for your contributions, both written and oral. You are going to
send us a web link so that we can explore for our greater sense
of security the blue map, Figure 1 on your evidence. If there
is anything else you think of that you wanted to write to the
Committee about, obviously we would be delighted to hear from
you. Thank you very much for your contribution this afternoon.
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