There are only three things you need to know to create a schedule of planning fees.

• What is your hourly rate?
• How many hours resource does each type of application take, on average?
• How many of each type of application will you receive?

The easy part should be calculating your hourly rate. This does not require weeks of time sheeting or lengthy bouts of external assistance but a straightforward assessment of the time worked on applications by your staff will suffice and to that you can add those non-employee costs which are incurred by the department; CIPFA has provided guidance on these. Importantly you should be able to explain the basis of the calculation to anybody presenting an FOI request; examine your models now and make sure you can.

The other two elements of any schedule are difficult to determine. Certainly time sheeting does not give you the figures you need to determine the resources absorbed by each application type and the recent introduction of P codes to describe fixed and sliding scale fees makes this a doubly difficult job and one in which "judgement" needs to be applied.

Similarly if you have no history of application volumes (because the category descriptions have changed from Q to P) it will be difficult to forecast the forward looking volume and without this it is impossible to accurately predict the overall level of income you can expect.

This total level of income is, of course, what the finance department expects of all planning managers now. We know of several managers who are already under pressure to report their expected end of year income levels and some who are making rushed decisions on overall staffing levels without all the facts.

Finally one pitfall of all fees schedule models is that they are an annual model and there is an unspoken assumption that all the applications will come in regularly and in an even pattern. All planning managers know that this is hardly ever the case and when workload increases in an unexpected way for a short period the natural reaction is to take on additional resource – or increase your costs. When the workload reduces that additional cost can be released but if the annual volume of applications is the same as initially predicted then the damage has been done and your costs will not be recovered. The same applies if the mix of application types is not exactly as predicted.

At ValueAdding.com we believe that creating the initial schedule of fees and more importantly, explaining it to others, managing it throughout the year and maintaining it year on year, should be simple and cheap to do. Alongside our easy to use models we are now pioneering the use of simulation software to help planning managers manage and to give finance managers confidence in the eventual outturn.

We are running a series of workshops around the country to help authorities with this and would love to see you there. For further details contact us.