Andrew Watt:
Cat among the pigeons

It's late in the day and I'm staring at a map of Cheshire pinned to the office wall, pondering the interaction of the county's town centres as part of current retail development instruction.

When I first decided to give it a go in the North West, back in the early 1990s I landed first in Hale, Cheshire. The reality of the political map at that time was of course that the former expanse of Cheshire County had long-since been fiddled with during local government reorganisation in the early 1970s. The residents of Hale and Altrincham, Hyde, Stockport and other disenfranchised parts of the former county have nevertheless continued to hold doggedly on to that former status.

For the residue of the County some 30 years later, it's all change again following a central Government announcement in December 2007 that it intends to press on with a proposed shake-up of the local government structure. No loss of land to made‑up metropolitan authorities this time, just wiping out seven borough councils and replacing them with two unitary authorities to create a single tier of local government, predictably to be known as Cheshire East Council and Cheshire West Council. East will comprise of Crewe & Nantwich, Congleton and Macclesfield. West contains Chester, Ellesmere Port & Neston nd Vale Royal.

The elections on 1 May selected the shadow councils for the new authorities as the respective boroughs direct themselves towards the April 2009 handover date for control of services. It's not all been plain sailing - there's a great deal of disquiet in the boroughs which, for those non-resident, could have been all too easy to miss.

In Congleton, feelings were running sufficiently high for the council to seek a judicial review that challenged the Government's proposed shake down - under the proposed new arrangements the number of councillors for the Congleton area will fall from 55 at present, to 21 - that's a big change - and the incumbent authority feared a deterioration in the quality and 'localness' of service delivery in circumstances when it considered that it was doing a good job of meeting the needs of its population.

Alas, the council's legal challenge failed, along with that pursued by other similarly aggrieved authorities in other parts of the country. The council has accepted that it must now engage positively with its new stable-mates in joint working arrangements as a forerunner to the new authority. It's the public sector equivalent of a merger and acquisition, which a good number of private sector planners and surveyors will have experienced in relatively recent years. It can be an uncomfortable and unsettling time.

It's a potential nightmare for the development advocate

Looking below the surface there are apparent differences - my counterparts in local authority forward planning teams are slap‑bang in the middle of trying to get to grips with the a new development plan system which will see Local Development Frameworks replace the currently familiar Local Plans and Structure Plans. Reorganisation means, really quite suddenly, it's all change, and the chances are fewer forward planning staff can handle the work in the new enlarged authorities.

Life as a development control officer seems less fraught with uncertainty if the mutterings I hear are representative. Bar the obvious bun‑fight for the head honcho's position, there should be plenty of room for existing officers as the number of planning applications flowing through the system should be no different.

However the short-term uncertainty sparked by the Government's December 2007 announcement has led to very great difficulties for some local authorities, where it has proved hard to recruit sufficient staff to meet the every-day demands placed on them. Congleton, for example, has been forced to lean quire heavily on support from Capita Symonds to handle planning applications because it has been unable to fill vacant posts and leakage to alternative jobs with more certainty has been a feature of staff movements.

For users of the planning system there are few positives to be taken from the presence of this uncertainty in local authority planning departments. It's a potential nightmare for the development advocate, for whom it's time to dig out the handbook of how to engage a 'condemned man' in an upbeat discussion about an exciting new development scheme. But spare a though for the officers concerned - they will be back.

Andrew Watt is a partner at MAZE Planning Solutions