The Commons Public Accounts Committee has published its report on ‘Planning for Homes – Speeding up Planning Applications for Major Housing Developments in England’. The report focused on the incentives to encourage planning authorities to perform well, the changes made to the development management process and Community and Local Government’s (CLG) efforts to increase planning capacity. Under scrutiny was the setting of national targets for decision-making and the provision of the Planning Delivery Grant (PDG).
Edward Leigh MP, committee chairman said: “The measures introduced by CLG to speed up the handling by local authorities of planning applications for major housing developments are having unintended effects. Yes, the authorities have now focused their efforts on increasing the number of decisions taken within the 13 week target period. But the target has created perverse incentives: authorities can lose interest in applications once the target has been missed; and, of the decisions taken within the 13 weeks, a much greater proportion are rejections than acceptances.”
The committee’s report acknowledged that between 2002-03 and 2007-08, the percentage of major residential planning applications decided within 13 weeks almost doubled to 67 per cent. However, the report claimed CLG did not know how long it took on average for applications to be determined, whether the time taken had fallen over time, and whether there has been an improvement in the total time taken for schemes to progress from pre-application to the start of construction.
The report alleged that the target regime has resulted in some “perverse” consequences. For example, as authorities prioritised their efforts on taking decisions within the 13 week target period, there has been less focus on applications that have missed the target.
The committee also argued that the department’s measures to improve the application process had met with mixed success. CLG has encouraged authorities to hold pre-application discussions with developers, but councils were unclear about the purpose of these discussions, MPs found. The report highlighted that some authorities have not deployed sufficiently senior and experienced staff in the discussions, and authorities had also taken different approaches to charging. Authorities’ monitoring of developers’ discharge of the conditions attached to planning permissions had been given a low priority, partly because of the focus on meeting the 13 week decision target.
Other issues covered by the report included concern over the time taken by statutory consultees to comment on applications and the mixed success of the department’s attempts to persuade more students to take up planning as a profession. The MPs also voiced doubts over how much of the PDG had been used to beef up planning services.
http://www.planningportal.gov.uk/england/professionals/en/1115316706221.html
