Cape Town needs to improve its planning to avoid having to spend millions on porta-potties and bucket-system toilets for informal settlements, says an academic expert. Dr Kevin Winter, a member of a research group on urban water management at the University of Cape Town, said yesterday it was difficult to provide sanitation in informal settlements, but that good planning would help."We should be planning as if people really matter," he said.He was speaking on the eve of today's tabling of the City of Cape Town 2015/16 budget, in which one of the most contentious items is water and sanitation.After the draft budget was published last month, organisations including the Social Justice Coalition (SJC) and Ndifuna Ukwazi - which campaign for justice and equality in poor and working-class communities - criticised the city's allocation for its 204 informal settlements. According to their analysis of the R37.5-billion budget,R22-million is proposed for direct capital spending on sanitation infrastructure in informal settlements in 2015.The SJC argued that most of the R22-million would be spent on temporary solutions such as portable and chemical toilets.Winter said: "We are just not dealing with some of the really difficult solutions in terms of land tenure and planning informal settlements properly."But Kevin Allen, from Municipal IQ, a data and intelligence service specialising in the monitoring and assessment of municipalities, said it was too expensive for any city to provide permanent sanitation solutions in informal settlements."If Cape Town were to roll out flush toilets per household you ... would not have the budget to provide some form of sanitation for the entire population of the informal settlements."He agreed with temporary solutions where the "situation was very fluid" - but not for established settlements.Mayoral committee member for utility services Ernest Sonnenberg said that in addition to the capital spending, R403-million would be spent on water and sanitation in informal settlements. The human settlements department had also budgeted for development in informal settlements.The council has previously said constraints in providing flush toilets in informal settlements were that they were either on land not suitable for them, or private land.The SJC said 74% of informal settlements were on state land and its sanitation spokesman, Axolile Notywala, said most of the operating budget for sanitation in informal settlements was spent on outsourcing temporary services."The city is ... treating informal settlements as temporary. Most of these informal settlements have existed for more than 10 years."Homes truthsThere are 147000 informal structures in informal settlements in Cape Town;8% of Cape Town households have no access to sanitation on site. That's one in 12;More than 48 000 households in Cape Town use the bucket toilet system - about one in 22;35.7% of Cape Town households live below the poverty line of less than R3500 a month. That's a bit more than one in three...