Jobs will be axed at Birmingham City Council’s planning department as the economic recession begins to bite into the building industry.
A sharp downturn in new planning applications and a fall in the number of requests by home buyers for land searches is causing a major financial headache, with the planning and regeneration budget likely to plunge £1.4million into the red this year.
While council leaders claim Birmingham is well placed to ride out the recession and point to more than £1billion of development in the pipeline, many of the lucrative projects that were expected to have come before the planning committee have been delayed.
Proposals for a £100million vertical theme park at Eastside, housing the UK’s tallest observation tower, are yet to be presented to the planning committee some three years after being launched, while plans for a technology park on the former BBC Pebble Mill site have not been submitted.
As a result, hefty fees for processing planning applications that the council thought it could rely on have failed to materialise.
Planning committee chairman Peter Douglas Osborn admitted that more than a quarter of posts in the department remain vacant and will not be filled, while further cuts are being examined.
Jobs would disappear, but he was unable to say how many at the moment.
Coun Douglas Osborn (Con, Weoley) added: “Fewer applications have been received generally, but the larger schemes, with the subsequent higher fees, have been noticeably reduced.
“This, along with the economic downturn, and the reduced level of income from local land search fees, has had a very significant impact on the financial pressures on the service to the extent that posts have had to be deleted, agency support cut and planning application appeal statements brought back in-house.
“A thorough review of planning management services will see overall staffing levels reducing to reflect the current economic downturn.”
He said the department had been failing to meet its income targets for two years and was taking “appropriate action” to balance the books.
Income from land search fees began to fall in 2007/08, forcing the council cabinet to approve an £1million bail out.
The shortfall this year, made worse by an increasing share of the land search market being cornered by private firms, is expected to be £900,000.
On top of that, the collapse in the number of planning applications will cost the department £1.1million.
And to make matters worse, the department is still required to find £73,000 efficiency savings as part of a council-wide drive to reduce costs.
Coun Douglas Osborn said savings would be achieved through “a combination of slimmer, flatter management structures, controlling staff costs more tightly, changing business processes and improving output and efficiency”.
