Agenda and minutes

Received from Councilllor Mouna Hamitouche.

None.

None.

RESOLVED:

That the minutes of the meeting held on 14 July 2015 be confirmed as a correct record and the Chair be authorised to sign them.

The Service Manager for Environmental Health outlined the proposals in her report and the rationale for amending the special treatment fee structure. She noted that Licensing Officers had now adopted a risk based approach to monitoring of premises and providers of special treatments. Given that there had been a steady increase in the number of premises providing high risk treatments in the past few years and a consequent higher level of assessment and monitoring was required to ensure public safety, more resources had been allocated to those premises providing high risk treatments.  To reflect these changes, the proposal was to amend the fee structure for special treatment licences to ensure that it reflected the cost of operating the scheme. This was to accord with the Provision of Services Regulations 2009, which required regulatory bodies to review application fees to ensure that they were set on a cost recovery basis.

Members asked questions about the current licence fees and how the estimated loss in income could be justified in the current financial climate faced by the Council.

The Licensing Officer said that officers had reviewed all of the costs and overheads associated with the monitoring of these types of premises. The costs for some of the low risk special treatment licences were hard to justify.  She was reasonably confident that the projected deficit in income could be managed within the licensing income budget overall.  It was also possible that the Licensing Authority would receive more applications for the high risk associated licensed treatments and income would be recouped that way.

RESOLVED:

That the fee structure for Special Treatment Licences, detailed in the Appendix to the report of the Service Director – Public Protection, be approved to take effect from

1 April 2016.

Reason for decision

The Licensing Officer had reported that the application fees for special treatment licences had been reviewed and that the new fee structure was consistent with the principles contained in the Provision of Services Regulations 2009, which required regulatory bodies to review application fees to ensure that they were set on a cost recovery basis.  Having had confirmation from the Licensing Officer, Members were satisfied that the projected deficit in income could be managed within the licensing income budget overall.