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ristol City Council has admitted that it only has 1.5 full time enforcement officers plus a team leader – despite having a workload of 444 cases in the last financial year.

However, its deputy head of planning Jonathan Dymond has insisted that the council is still carrying out enforcement activity and that the authority will plug the resource gap “after the summer”.

A report on the council’s enforcement position, submitted to a development management committee A meeting held on 6 March, admitted that “staff resource in PE [planning enforcement] is currently limited”, after the council “lost a senior enforcement officer and graduate officer in the last year”.

“As consecutive recruitment rounds to replace a senior planning enforcement officer in the last eight months were unsuccessful, staff in post is currently 1.5 full time employees plus the team leader,” the report stated.

“An agency resource had been brought in to help for six months but the cost of this is high and therefore not been continued,” it added.

The report also revealed that the number of enforcement notices served by the council plunged from 26 in 2020-21 when the council registered 482 cases, to just six in 2023-24 when it had 444 cases.

However, at a meeting held on 10 April by the council’s development control B committee, Dymond insisted that “enforcement activity is still happening” despite the severe capacity shortage.

He said: “The serving of a notice isn’t the only outcome when it comes to enforcement. There are other potential routes to resolution in terms of negotiation and also with applications being made to retain unauthorised development.”

Dymond explained the enforcement officer shortage was due to resources being “diverted away from enforcement” after the council “prioritised” clearing its planning application backlog.

A report to the council’s growth and regeneration scrutiny commission on 27 November revealed that the authority faced a backlog of 1,466 applications in October.

Dymond stressed that the council had “plans after the summer, hopefully, when the backlog is under control, to move some of the graduate resource into that service”.

He added: “We’ve been exploring joint working arrangements with the neighbourhood enforcement teams as well, so when those officers are out and about in the city they can do that investigation work that can then passed on to the enforcement team to allow them to make their assessments.”

The planning enforcement report also stated that “two graduates” would be transferred to enforcement, although at that time it had estimated this would be “in late spring or early summer”.

Responding to Dymond, Green councillor Guy Poultney questioned who had made the call to divert resources away from enforcement and towards the application backlog.

He said: “It’s the idea that there might be potentially no enforcement planning taking place over the summer, or at least a very minimal service, because an internal decision has been made to prioritise that resource to a different area, is something I think this committee should be aware of, especially given our recent history with the local government ombudsman.”

In November, the ombudsman fined the council £350 after finding it had failed to investigate a man’s reports about an alleged planning breach dating back to December 2021.

On 6 March, the council was placed in special measures by planning minister Lee Rowley over their slow rate of deciding non major applications, along with St Albans City and District Council.

Planning enforcement services are depleted in many local authorities across England.

In January, Mid Devon District Council admitted it had no planning enforcement officers to handle an annual workload of 300 cases.

A 2022 RTPI survey found that 80 per cent of local planning authority respondents reported that there were not enough officers in their enforcement team to match the level of workload, while 89 per cent said their councils were experiencing an enforcement backlog.

A Planning analysis examining why many councils’ planning enforcement services have collapsed can be found here.

Planning has asked Bristol City Council to clarify when it diverted resources from enforcement to development management, but it had not responded by the time of publication.

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