The Planning Officers Society has written to planning minister John Healey to ask for specific financial help for councils involved with proposals for nationally significant infrastructure projects like power stations, motorways, ports and new reservoirs.
The Society, which represents professional staff working in local authority planning services, claims the new planning regime for such schemes involves new responsibilities but less financial resources for local authorities as they do not receive planning application fees. Those will be paid to the newly-established Infrastructure Planning Commission.
Local authorities will play a key role in the new system, working with developers and the local community. Councils will help assess the public consultation by developers and produce a local impact report, detailed guidance on which will be published by the Government.
In his letter to Mr Healey, Society president David Hackforth claimed that the new regime places extra burdens on local authorities and urged “appropriate steps to provide councils with the extra resources needed to discharge these new responsibilities”.
The Society has made it clear that it is supporting the case made by Copeland Borough Council which is faced with major new nuclear generation plans.
Copeland has told Mr Healey that “those authorities that find they are dealing with a nationally significant infrastructure project will have an unusually large workload to deal with compared with other planning applications. In order to assess the impacts of the project and the steps needed to mitigate them for the purposes of the Local Impact Report, a variety of specialist commissions, by their nature costly, will be needed over a sustained period starting well before an application is made”.
Under the current system local authorities already look closely at any major infrastructure projects proposed in their area and engage with developers on potential applications. Councils also bear their own costs for their involvement in any inquiry held by the Planning Inspectorate and enforce conditions. Under the new regime, where councils provide discretionary services they have the power to recover these costs. It will be in the interest of promoters to ensure that councils are able to engage as fully as possible in the planning process for major infrastructure, to ensure that as many matters as possible can be resolved at an early stage.
A Communities and Local Government spokesperson said: “The new system under the IPC will be faster, fairer and save the country up to £300m every year. Current planning inquiries can last years and require councils to pay for a significant amount of expensive legal representation. The new regime intends to reduce these costs, and it is up to individual authorities to decide how they engage with the process.”
In a separate but related development, environmental groups and the Sustainable Development Commission have told Parliament that the energy suite of draft National Policy Statements are not fit for purpose.
The organisations, which include the Town and Country Planning Association, WWF, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, have been giving evidence to the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee.
They have complained that the IPC is hamstrung because it cannot deal with need issues or pronounce on the carbon emission implications of schemes. They criticised the energy NPSs for lack of spatial context and a failure to provide sufficient guidance on the appropriate energy mix.
Representatives from the organisations also told MPs that the Government’s consultation exercise was flawed and probably breached its own best practice guidance on public participation as well as the Aarhus Convention, the relevant UN treaty.
Link to Planning Portal News Article
Link to Planning Officers Society Article
