Approve the 2015/16 Authority Monitoring Report (AMR) for employment and retail data and information, as required by regulations to be published on the Council's website.

The Council regularly monitors how planning policies are being implemented in regards to the decision-taking process, as well as progress on the plan-making process for preparation of documents set out in the Local Development Scheme.

As agreed at Planning and Licensing Committee on 1 December 2015, as soon as monitoring data becomes available the information is collated for publication into a series of monitoring updates, each reporting on different monitoring issues, which together form the Council’s Authority Monitoring Reports (AMR).  For clarity these have been branded “Brentwood Monitoring Reports” to be consistent with the emerging Brentwood Local Development Plan (LDP) and other supporting documents.

An AMR on employment and retail, for the period 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2016 has been prepared for publication.

Cllr Mynott pointed out that some units west of the High Street were not mapped according to retail use (Figure 2) and so some information is lost.

A motion was MOVED by Cllr McCheyne and SECONDED by Cllr Bridge to approve the recommendation in the report.

A vote was taken by a show of hands and it was RESOLVED UNANIMOUSLY:

1.         To approve publication of the Brentwood Monitoring Report Employment and Retail 2015/16, as set out in Appendix A.

REASON FOR RECOMMENDATION

It is important that the Council publishes monitoring information in order to share performance and achievements with the local community as information becomes available.  It also meets the monitoring requirements set out in the NPPF and Town and Country Planning Regulations 2012, as amended by the Localism Act 2011.

In addition to publishing monitoring information in usual formats, such as a PDF document on the Planning pages of the Council’s website, use of the DataShare site will help meet the Council’s commitment to being open and transparent.  AMR data will be freely available to view and download in a variety of formats.