28 March 2008
Town hall leaders have hit back angrily after ministers pledged this week to 'bust red tape' and 'weed out bureaucracy' to speed up the sluggish planning regime.
The Local Government Association rounded on the government following the launch of a review of planning by Communities Secretary Hazel Blears and housing minister Caroline Flint on March 25.
Blears said she wanted to tackle the 'slow and cumbersome' parts of the system, such as unnecessary paperwork and delays in finalising schemes after outline permission has been granted.
But Paul Bettison, chair of the LGA's environment board, pointed the finger at central government for causing much of the delay with its excessive bureaucratic demands.
'Councils don't want pointless delay, complexity and cost in the planning system. The government's review needs to recognise that it arises from a variety of causes, not least from the requirements of 2,000 pages of policy statements issued by government,' he warned.
'While democratically accountable local councils want good-quality homes and commercial development, it is also inevitable that sometimes they will have to say no to poor quality or inappropriate proposals on behalf of the people whom they are elected to serve.'
Relations between central and local government are already strained due to the controversial Planning Bill currently before Parliament, which will take decisions over large infrastructure projects out of local authority control.
The LGA's comments were echoed by the Royal Town Planning Institute, the professional body representing planners. Rynd Smith, its director of policy, told Public Finance that homeowners wanting to undertake small-scale home improvements with little impact on neighbours should be taken out of the planning regime altogether.
He said this would ease the pressure on local authority planning departments, which are facing an 'inexorable rise' in the number of applications as home improvements become ever more popular.
'The government needs to look much more intelligently at the threshold set in law as to which schemes need to be subject to planning approval,' Smith told PF.
He also cautioned against any attempt to speed up the planning process by reducing the deadlines within which applications have to be processed, warning that it would lead to perverse outcomes and poor developments. 'The planning system should be judged by the quality of its outcomes, not just the speed with which those outcomes are delivered,' Smith said.
Launching the review, called Planning applications: a faster and more responsive system, Flint said the aim was to make the regime more user-friendly for business and individuals.
'People often say they find the process of getting planning permission confusing and bureaucratic. By modernising the system we can save everyone time and money and deliver the kind of effective and responsive planning service people deserve.'
PFmar2008
