A lack of available staff has been blamed for a council’s inability to hit its own target in deciding planning applications on time.

A meeting of Anglesey Council’s Corporate Scrutiny Committee found that only 81% of planning applications had been determined on time, falling short of the 90% target.

Typically, Anglesey Council expects most planning decisions to have been made within eight weeks of receiving the application.

More complex applications can take longer, however, as they often involve collecting and considering the views of government agencies and expert advisors, neighbours and possibly objectors to the development.

An application involving an Environmental Impact Assessment has an even longer time frame, with 16 weeks being the normal time set to decide such applications.

Addressing the failure to hit the target, the planning portfolio holder told the committee meeting that this was down to a lack of available staff.

“We often speak of the department’s capacity, but its clear now that when one officer is off it can have a major effect,” said Cllr Richard Dew.

According to officers, however, the worse than expected performance over 2018/29 was largely down to a particularly poor period between October and December 2018, which saw only 74% being determined on time.

The report blamed the underperformance on the absence of a Senior Planning Officer “during a substantial proportion of the year” and a heavy workload in shaping the new planning system while coping with the requirements of GDPR.

Dewi Francis Jones, the authority’s chief planning officer, added,  “To put it into context, there has been a lot of work to streamline the service and develop new systems over the past year.

“This has meant we’ve had to evaluate roles and responsibilities of team members, which has had an effect on the workflow and performance.

“We have also been working to clear the backlog in the enforcement field, again, this has been a factor.

“However this has been necessary to be in a position to move forward and I would commend the individual officers for their work.

“This gives us a solid platform going forward and we have already filled an empty role and created another new role to assist with GDPR requirements.”

The annual corporate scorecard also found that the authority ended the year overspending by £633,000 – however, this was an improvement on earlier expectation and reports made throughout the year.

While the service budgets had collectively overspent by £2.287m, an underspend in the corporate finance budget resulted in this figure being slashed.

Sickness absence was also above target, with the average employee missing 10.34 days – falling short of the 9.75 figure that the authority had set itself.

However, there was better news on the customer service front with over 4,700 reports filed by islanders via the heavily promoted “AppMôn” mobile app or website.

This included reports of fly tipping, faulty street lighting, compliments or complaints, broken pavements, sports club database forms and ordering recycling bins.

The number of registered users on AppMôn and the council website also increased by over 1,500 users from the end of December to 8155 at the end of April.

The report concluded, “This is positive and it is anticipated that now the new

website is in place this will encourage a greater use of online forms and online

contact which will drive our digital channel shift to enabling resident to be able to pay and request services online.

“Because of this it is expected that online web payment numbers will also increase further in 2019/20.

“Our social media presence increased once again during Q4 to 29.5k followers. This is shared between Facebook (13.5k followers), Twitter (15k followers) and Instagram (1k).

“These modes of communication are continuing to increase and the flow of information distributed and received via these channels will only increase

further, changing the way by which residents and others communicate with us as a council.”