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 Peak Cluster Carbon Capture Project.
 

Decision

The Cabinet Member:

1) authorised officers to procure specialist technical consultancy support for the Council’s participation in the Development Consent Order process for the Peak Cluster Carbon Capture Project;

2)  authorised officers to enter into a Planning Performance Agreement with PCL on behalf of the Council 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 Council. 

Reasons for the decision

To support the Council’s case for objecting to the Development Consent Order Peak Cluster Carbon Capture Project and its continued participation in the DCO process for the Project. 

Alternative options considered

Option 1: Do nothing - The Council could decide not to enter into a PPA with PCL and participate in the DCO process without procuring specialist consultancy support. However, the officer resource implications would be considerable for a NSIP proposal as large and complex as the PCCCP, particularly through the Examination in Public phase of the process. Without such specialist support, there would need to be an allocation of considerable officer time for the Council to fully engage in the DCO process, which would require staff resources to be reallocated from other priority areas of the Planning Service’s work and similarly with other teams within the Place Department. Procurement of specialist advice and support would significantly reduce the burden on the Council’s officer resources and be more likely to contribute beneficially to the robustness and comprehensive nature of the Council’s case, that it would need to put forward through the Examination in Public phase to justify and support its objection to the PCCCP proposals. 

Option 2:  Engage the specialist consultancy support on an interim contract basis - Officers had 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 as complex as the PCCCP, this approach would likely necessitate engaging several agency workers concurrently. This option was also likely to be considerably more costly and complex to manage as separate contracts would need to be agreed with multiple individual agency workers, 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 less complex to administer, particularly as only one single contract would need to 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.