The Council’s Regeneration and Planning Service is based mostly in Morecambe Town Hall, on the Promenade. Colleagues can enjoy the clean coastal air and lunch time walks offering exceptional views across the sandy beaches of Morecambe Bay to the Lake District’s hills. The service has three sections each with a senior service manager reporting to the Chief Officer who is part of the Council’s Senior Management Team. The Service has a large and diverse range of responsibilities including local planning, housing strategy, conservation, development management, regeneration, engineering, economic development and tourism. The regeneration service designs and implements coastal defences and urban realm projects. The services many teams are well integrated and create a really positive, welcoming environment with a notably professional and focussed work ethic.

The service’s teams feature a good mixture of professionals with a wealth of experience that they are happy to share, and less experienced professionals developing their skills in an environment which really does offer an unparalleled diversity of interesting planning challenges. Planners at Lancaster need to consider how to integrate the constraints and opportunities of a district with one of the largest concentrations of heritage assets in the UK, two Universities, including the exceptional UK top-ten Lancaster University, two nuclear power stations, a major Irish Sea port and a growing off-shore turbine and energy sector. The population is well-educated and takes a pride in the beautiful coast of Morecambe Bay, the Lune Valley, parts of two AONBs and a National Park.

The Planning and Housing Policy team prepares the local plan, the housing strategy and manages the district’s heritage assets. The experienced team of ten officers is addressing the major challenge of preparing a new local plan that must take account of the economic opportunity provided by the imminent opening of a major new motorway link road and expanding university to provide for 13,000 new homes and 9,500 new jobs by 2031. The Planning and Housing Policy team is supporting the many local communities that are working on Neighbourhood Plans and considering how best to integrate these community initiatives with the emerging local plan. With expectations of the emerging local plan by early 2017, this year is set to be busy and interesting.

The Council’s Resources Service is based in Lancaster Town Hall, within the historic city of Lancaster. The service has four sections each with a senior service manager reporting to the Chief Officer who is part of the Council’s Senior Management Team. The Service has a large and diverse range of responsibilities including financial services, information, communications and technology, property management, customer services and revenues and benefits. The services many functions are well integrated and create a really positive, welcoming environment with a notably professional and focussed work ethic.

The financial services section includes accountancy, internal audit, exchequer services, procurement and insurance and risk management. The teams feature a good mixture of qualified and non-qualified officers with a wealth of experience providing support to all services within the Council.

The accountancy team within Financial Services consists of eleven posts, and is responsible for preparation of the Council’s annual revenue and capital budgets, providing regular budget monitoring information, production of the annual statement of accounts, providing support to Members and Officers on financial matters, and implementing, maintaining and developing financial systems. In addition, it is responsible for managing the Council’s treasury management activities, including investments of circa £40M and a borrowings portfolio of £67M.

Overall, the Council has an annual General Fund net revenue budget of £16M and a gross four year capital programme of £37M, in addition it still owns and manages its council housing stock which costs £15M per annum and has a £23M gross four year capital programme.

ICT provide information, communications and technology services and support to the whole organisation as well as LLPG, GIS and street naming and numbering. There is an operations team of 9 posts and a development team of 10½. The development team are involved in all aspects of ICT development from infrastructure through to applications development and procurement, business analysis and account management. Working in this team everyone gets exposure from legacy systems to leading edge.