Will Labour’s move to hire 300 planning officers be enough to get Britain building again?
Since entering office, planning reforms have been central to the new government’s attempts to stimulate higher economic growth.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has already announced a number of important changes to the planning regime with more changes expected before the end of the month. Alongside these reforms, the government has committed to hire 300 extra planners and modernise planning committees.
A number of experts suggested that Labour’s hopes of streamlining the planning system would rely as much on extra funding for planners as on reforms to the regime itself.
Matthew White, UK and EMEA real estate managing partner at Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF), said “providing additional resources to local planning authorities to increase capacity will be central to success given the current levels of under-funding and under-staffing in planning teams”.
Claire Dutch, co-head of planning at law firm Ashurst, said that the government’s commitment to increase local planning authorities’ (LPA) capacity will be “music to the ears of developers and planning officers alike”.
Local government faced deep spending cuts during the 2010s, contributing to serious under-staffing in LPAs. According to the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), a quarter of all public sector planners left the sector between 2013 and 2020.
Under-staffing is an important reason why decisions have slowed down in recent years. According to the government, only nine per cent of LPAs are making decisions on over 70 per cent of non-major applications within 8 weeks.
When it comes to major applications, just one per cent of LPAs determine more than 60 per cent of projects within the statutory 13-week period.
While the pledge to increase the number of planners was broadly welcomed, Martyn Jarvis, senior associate at HSF said it was unlikely sufficient to help Labour’s growth push.
“300 planning officers across England (roughly 1 officer per planning department) will not be enough to re-tool departments to manage what they will need to as efficiently as is needed,” he said.
“More will be needed to provide adequate resource,” he said, suggesting it might have to come from private sector funding.
The government has also signalled its ambition to streamline the regime for major pieces of infrastructure, something a number of previous governments have already taken steps towards.
Charlie Reid, a partner at Ashurst, said resourcing would be critical here too. “However, the more streamlined the system becomes, it won’t deliver results unless it is adequately resourced,” he said.
“An inevitable product of having a ‘2030 clean power mission’ will be an increase in planning and development consent order (DCO) applications for energy projects – authorities will need to be resourced to prevent the system clogging up,” he said.
Addressing ways to modernise committees, Victoria Hills, chief executive of the RTPI, suggested there should be a “national scheme of delegation,” allowing planning officers to make some decisions rather than elected councillors.
“Qualified planners should be able to implement agreed planning policy, freeing up councillors’ time to focus on the most challenging planning cases. This change would help to unblock many applications and speed up the planning process,” she argued.