Chesterfield appoints planning assistant to help with rising workloads

Chesterfield Borough Council's recent adoption of its key core strategy planning document has prompted its planning team to recruit a new planning assistant to work on major schemes.

Lisa Howard will deal with casework, planning applications, pre-application talks and planning correspondence, according to development management and conservation manager Paul Staniforth.

“We adopted our core strategy a few months ago and its focus is to promote the growth of Chesterfield through housing, employment and development,” he told Planning.

“Fortunately we are seeing an upturn in activity, which is mainly down to signs the economy is on the up again, which is reflected in the increasing volume of work we are seeing.”

Staniforth said the authority had a lot of major schemes "in the wings" and Howard would be working on these and other projects.

The town had “serious ambitions” for growth over the next 10 years including a £340m waterside regeneration scheme, a multimillion pound town centre retail scheme and 7,600 new homes.

“The planned growth comes at a time when the golden thread running through all government advice is to try and make is easier for people to carry out development and for local authority to work pro-actively on sustainable development", he said.

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