Planners at Stafford Borough Council have increased their productivity – but the backlog in applications yet to be validated still remains "too high", councillors have been told.

The authority has been dealing with a backlog of planning applications for a number of years, as well as facing an overspend in the department.

Stafford Borough Council commissioned an external independent review of its planning service in 2024. Mondrem, a not-for profit social enterprise whose purpose is to improve public services, carried out the review and an improvement plan was produced.

It has focussed on the number of planning decisions made per person per day, efficiency in process and systems, customer experience, staff wellbeing and financial sustainability of the service.

On Thursday (July 2), the council's Economic Development and Planning Scrutiny Committee heard that measures brought in during recent months include an application advice service and new ways of working with consultees, such as the highways authority and environmental health department.

Lucy Gibbs, Head of Client Solutions at Mondrem Group, told cllrs on Thursday: "The team have written a customer charter, which is not published on the website yet, but they are acting as if it was in place already.

"There's a new way to communicate with customers who have sent new planning applications in; there's some key points of contact at which the case officer will contact the customer.

"Productivity through the project has increased by 34% which is great – you're making better use of the people you have got.

"But your validation backlog remains way too high, the validation queue remains way too long and it's very difficult to do proactive communication in that validation queue, and all of the customer improvements now need to be implemented."

Stafford Borough Council received 48 Stage 1 and 22 Stage 2 complaints about its development service during 2025/26 – up from nine and four respectively in the previous year.

A report to last month's Resources Scrutiny Committee meeting said: "Unfortunately, the planning service has received large amounts of applications over a sustained period leading to backlogs in multiple areas which has led to frustrations with agents and applicants culminating in an increase in complaints."

Cllr Brendan McKeown highlighted a delay Hixon Parish Council had faced when submitting a planning application for a new office.

He said at the Resources Scrutiny Committee meeting that the application was in the system for 14 weeks before it was validated.

He added: "The only reason why it wasn't validated is because one of the plans didn't have a scale bar on or the north point – it felt to me they were such minor things that could have been dealt with once it had been validated."

Cllr Jon Powell, speaking at Thursday's meeting, said: "The biggest frustration I find when I speak to people is the timescales.

"They have put the application in they don't know what's going on – they can see the application has been registered but don't know what stage it's at."

Ms Gibbs said: "The main complaint is they don't know timescales we're working to, so most of the chases are around timescales.

"As soon as it gets allocated to an officer they get in touch.

"We discourage applicants from sending lots of emails in because planning is one of those disciplines where you need a bit of head space.

"You're taking in a lot of complex information from a lot of different sources, and anything that interrupts that flow, when you've got your head in a case, really does slow everything down.

"But we're trying to get ahead of that by stopping any reason why anybody might chase.

"We're trying to make sure the website has all of the information they can self-serve on, they can see all the comments coming in from consultees, any documentation that has been provided and representations that have been made, so they can get a sense of how it's going themselves."

Dean Piper, head of economic development and planning, said: "We've developed a customer charter and a new communication toolkit for the staff.

"We are trialling and testing and refining it.

"What we have recognised as part of this project is communication is inconsistent and there are applicants who have waited a very long time for an application to be processed and determined.

"They can go months without hearing anything and that's where you get the repeated chasers, then the escalation to me or to yourselves as members.

"This customer charter sets out what you can expect from the council and we will make this information available on our website as a way of communicating to customers this is how we will work in the planning service going forward.

"If we can utilise technology more effectively to help above and beyond what we can already provide on the planning portal, we will do it.

"What we are saying is customers will be kept informed through the process at key stages.

"But they won't get a running commentary or a daily update – you can't have continuous updates because it is just not feasible with the workloads the case officers have got."