Agenda item

Member Training

The Town Clerk commented that, at the beginning of this year, Committee Members had been offered regular training sessions ahead of these Committee meetings on various different planning related issues. Feedback received on these had been overwhelmingly positive and all sessions had also been recorded for the benefit of those who had been unable to attend which had also enabled the department to begin to build up a learning library of sorts for any new Members joining the Committee in future. The Town Clerk went on to report that the intention was to now email Members at the conclusion of this meeting to ascertain any further training requirements that they may have and to then begin to schedule in some dates for future training sessions around these.

The Town Clerk undertook to recirculate the link to the learning library to all Members.

A Member underlined that there were likely to be a number of new members joining this Committee and indeed the Court following the March elections and asked that future training be scheduled with this in mind. He also suggested that an hour long training session was not necessarily sufficient for all topics, some of which were more complex. Officers undertook to factor this into the scheduling of future sessions. The Town Clerk reported that there would be a wider Member Induction Programme for those who were new to the Court exploring the generalities of key Committees such as Planning and Transportation and that more specialist training would then be offered as and when they were appointed to this Committee.