City’s planners facing job axe
JOBS will be axed at Birmingham City Council’s planning department as the economic recession begins to bite into the building industry.
A sharp downturn in planning applications and requests by home buyers for land searches is causing a major financial headache, with the planning and regeneration budget likely to plunge £1.4million into the red this year.
While council leaders claim Birmingham is well placed to ride out the recession and point to more than £1billion of development in the pipeline, many expected lucrative projects have been delayed.
Proposals for a £100million vertical theme park at Eastside, housing the UK’s tallest observation tower, are yet to be presented three years after being launched, while plans for a technology park on the former BBC Pebble Mill site have not been submitted.
As a result, hefty fees for processing planning applications that the council thought it could rely on have failed to materialise.
Planning committee chairman Peter Douglas Osborn said more than a quarter of posts in the department remain vacant and will not be filled, while further cuts are being examined. Jobs would disappear, but he was unable to say how many.
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