Purpose

To seek Cabinet Member approval for the County Council to procure specialist technical consultancy support for its participation in the Development Consent Order process for the Chesterfield to Willington Electricity Line Project.
 

Decision

The Cabinet Member:

1) authorised officers to procure specialist technical consultancy support on behalf of the Council for its participation in the Development Consent Order process for the Chesterfield to Willington Electricity Line Project;

2) authorised officers to enter into a Planning Performance Agreement on behalf of the County Council with NGET through which the Council can recover the full costs of procuring the specialist consultancy support; and

3) delegated authority to the Director of Economy and Regeneration to sign the Planning Performance Agreement on behalf of the County Council. 

Reasons for the decision

To support the County Council’s case for objecting to the Development Consent Order for Chesterfield to Willington Electricity Line Project and its continued participation in the DCO process for the Project. 

Alternative options considered

Option 1: Do not enter into a PPA with NGET and participate in the DCO process without procuring specialist consultancy support - Further to consideration, it was likely the officer resources needed to support the DCO process would be considerable for a NSIP proposal as large and complex as the CWELP, particularly through the Examination in Public phase of the process. Without access to additional, specialist support, officer time/resources within the Planning Service would need to be reallocated from existing work to allow full engagement in the DCO process; this would be to the detriment of other core work. Procurement of specialist advice would also more likely contribute to the robustness and comprehensive nature of the Council’s case being prepared for the Examination in Public. This option was therefore not preferred. 

Option 2: Engage a specialist consultancy support on an interim contract basis - Officers considered the options for procuring the specialist consultancy support required to support the Council’s position. One approach would be to engage interim specialist agency support on a contracted basis, based on a set number of hours per week. However, given the breadth of expertise required to support a DCO of the complexity of this CWELP, this approach would likely necessitate engaging several agency workers concurrently.  This option was also likely to be more costly and complex to manage as separate contracts would need to be agreed with multiple individuals, potentially across different recruitment agencies. By contrast, the approach proposed in Option 1, to engage specialist support from a single multi-disciplinary consultancy, would offer significant economies of scale, be more cost effective and simpler to administer. A single contract would be agreed with the chosen consultancy, which would provide all the necessary expertise in-house. In addition, this approach allowed costs to be incurred on a task-specific basis as work was undertaken on the DCO, rather than through fixed, ongoing weekly costs typically associated with interim agency arrangements.