Planning has slowed down and it is NOT your imagination…
I will start by saying that I have HUGE sympathy for all my friends who are planning officers. They are overworked and underpaid and there simply aren’t enough of them. They have angry residents and angry Councillors shouting at them (stop it!) so if you are an applicant, please don’t shout at them too. 99.99% of planning officers are there for the right reasons, but they are doing a very difficult job.
However, this does not detract from the fact that the planning system has slowed down to a crawl. Everything is taking forever, and in some places, validation of applications now takes almost as long as it should to determine them. The actual applications then take a very long time with extensions of time to get away from the statutory deadlines for determination. And even when you get your permission, the S106 agreement can take months to complete.
The Government (for what it is worth) is running a consultation on a new “special measure” metric that will penalise LPAs that don’t perform at the required efficiency levels. Some 97% of English planning authorities would be at risk of the ‘special measures’ designation for slow decision-making under their current performance if the government’s proposal for a new special measures metric to cut down on the use of extension of time agreements is implemented!
The consultation proposes that Councils be required to determine 50% of major applications and 60% of non-major applications within the statutory time limits of thirteen and eight weeks respectively or face the naughty step. The current thresholds are 60% for major applications and 70% for non-major applications.
Additionally, the consultation proposes that the assessment period for speed of decision-making be reduced from 24 months to 12 months and that performance be measured against both the “current measure, which includes extension of time agreements and planning performance agreements, and the new measure, which would cover decisions within statutory time limits only”.
But let’s look at it a bit closer to see how Councils are performing… Planning Magazine carried out an analysis of government data and it reveals that 313 out of 328 local planning authorities, or 95%, fell below the 50% threshold for the speed of major district-level decisions. Of these 313 councils, 24 councils failed to make a single major decision within the statutory time period!
Is the answer to put the Councils into special measures? What would that actually achieve? To be honest, Lil Lee Rowley, the minister who is in charge of planning can shout at them all he likes, but who is ultimately going to do the work? It sure ain’t gonna be him!
I just hope that a future Government is more practically minded and actually does something to train, recruit and most importantly RETAIN good planners at our Councils so we can get things going.
Until next week,
Henry