Moray Council has been praised for reducing the amount of time taken on planning application decisions.
The local authority was given feedback from the Scottish Government on its planning performance framework for 2017/18.
It was awarded 14 green and one amber marker.
The average timescale for making decisions beat the national average in all three sections – major developments, local and householder developments.
The positive feedback was praised by some local councillors at a planning and regulatory services committee meeting yesterday.
Forres councillor Aaron Mclean said: “This is a fantastic turnaround for the whole team, especially from 2012 so the team has to be congratulated for this.”
Heldon and Laich councillor John Cowe also praised planning officials for “moving things forward in the right direction.”
Moray Council’s decision making timescale for major developments has reduced from 98.2 weeks in 2013-14 to 16.5 weeks in 2017-18 which compares to the national average of 37.1.
Overall, the local authority has shown a steady improvement over the last six years but Beverly Smith, manager of Development Management at Moray Council, insisted that there was still more to do.
She said: “All 32 local authorities across Scotland have also made significant improvements.
“There are other authorities performing better than us – one authority is dealing with applications in 4.3 weeks which is a significant difference to what we are doing.”
And Forres councillor Claire Feaver raised concerns about the quality of the decision making.
She said: “We are looking at quantity here, while I’d like to see quality.
“We are doing more things faster but is that leaving us at risk that the quality of decisions has been hit?”
However, Ms Smith allayed her concerns and said: “All decisions are either approvals or rejections and with our local development plan coming, we need to see how we can quantify that.
“It’s all about implementation on the ground level.”
Moray Council introduced a new validation system for planning last year which requested additional information from prospective applicants at an earlier stage.
The changes mean applications now need to have as much supportive information as possible lodged with the plans, including tree surveys and draining information before they are validated and put forward for consideration.
Moray Council introduced a new validation system for planning last year which requested additional information from prospective applicants at an earlier stage.
The changes mean applications now need to have as much supportive information as possible lodged with the plans, including tree surveys and draining information before they are validated and put forward for consideration.
