Norfolk Chamber members recently supplied case studies on areas of planning reform and productivity to the Communities and Local Government Select Committee Inquiry on planning and productivity reform.
The Communities and Local Government Committee monitors the policy, administration and spending of the Department for Communities and Local Government and its associated arms length bodies, including the Homes and Communities Agency. The Committee consists ofeleven backbench Members of Parliament. The Committee is an investigative Committee rather than a legislative Committee: it sets its own programme and chooses subjects for inquiries. For each inquiry, a press notice is issued listing the terms of reference and inviting interested parties to send written submissions. For most inquiries, the Committee will also hold question and answer “oral evidence” sessions with witnesses. These are held in public, normally in a Committee Room at the Houses of Parliament. Webcasts of recent oral evidence sessions can be viewed atParliament TV.
The Norfolk Chamber case studies formed part of a submission from the British Chambers of Commerce which asked the following questions of the Minister:
- Planning authorities can already effectively ‘zone’ brownfield land for development by granting permitted development rights (using Local Development Orders, for example). LDOs are flexible instruments that can be used for both residential housing and commercial / industrial development but it’s unclear to us how the zoning proposals would work alongside them. How do the proposed reforms improve on that regime?
- In regards to the scope of zones – is the Minister confident these will be big enough and numerous to deliver a meaningful step – change in development?
- The focus of the Government’s proposals is clearly on freeing up brownfield land for housing development. Without complementary reforms to free up greenbelt land of low environmental quality, will this not accelerate the trend of fallow employment land being reclassified as windfall housing land supply? Has the Government considered the economic consequences of further restricting the availability of land for industrial and commercial development?
- On the planning department’s capacity and resources – is the Minister confident that there is sufficient capacity and resources within planning authorities and statutory consultees to deliver a speedier system? There is a perception among some businesspeople that planning departments and publicly-funded statutory consultees are under-resourced and under-skilled, leading to rationing of service (see case studies below). What measures, if any, is the government taking to ensure that the impact of the reforms is not nullified by this?
The Select Committee are scheduled to question Brandon Lewis MP, Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government on Monday 7 September 2015 about planning and productivity.
The case studies, supplied by Norfolk Chamber members are shown below:
Case Study 1: Planning department resourcing constraints and service rationing (Chamber member property consultant, Norfolk)
‘Planning Authorities all seem to be under resourced. This is evidenced in at least a couple of ways:
‘I spoke to an officer only yesterday. He confirmed a particular application I am looking at will be decided by officer’s delegated powers, so not going to committee. Therefore will be determined within 8 weeks of validation. However, he further stated that it was unlikely to validate for at least 3 weeks due to resources.
‘Typically, we are finding that when it comes to validation, local authorities are looking to find reasons not to validate, so kicking further into the long grass. For instance, a small house extension submitted a month ago, took three weeks to reach the top of the pile at which point validation was rejected because we had not supplied a “Block Plan”. We actually had, but it had been termed “Site Plan”. We immediately adjusted and responded, but it had already been put back to the bottom of the pile. In other words, LPA’s are looking for technicalities to slow the process down.
‘Once an approval is achieved, the process to discharge conditions is long and tortuous, vastly extending the process. And with most significant approvals containing pre-commensurate conditions, these must be discharged before work commences on site, which all takes more time to compile info even before the discharge conditions application can be submitted. I suppose in summary, an approval is only the start of the approval process.’
Case Study 2: Dealing with planning applications in a timely fashion (Chamber member property consultant, Norfolk)
‘[This concerns] a ‘discharge of condition’ application we have been involved with for a major project in a Norfolk Local Authority area. We have been trying to get information signed-off by a key statutory consultee, in order that the development can proceed.
‘The required technical information and details were submitted as part of the application and the national statutory consultee came back and requested additional information. This was provided by the relevant consultant and sent via email directly to the local council and statutory consultee within 1 week. A chase email was sent by the developers [sic] planning consultant 7 days after the additional information was submitted where the consultee responded with the following:
“We have received this and are currently reviewing the information, we will provide a response in due course.”
‘A further 2 weeks elapsed with no response from the Council or Statutory consultee, during which time the developer’s planning consultant had sent emails at intervals of 7 days to the consultee requesting a response. Eventually, after 19 days, the statutory responded with the following:
‘”We are not currently looking at this as when we received the original consultation the additional information was not on the Council website, I did try to contact the council to clarify where the new information was but was unsuccessful, therefore the consultation was closed by us. We have since received an email from the Council confirming that the new information is now on their website, therefore we will review this information however our 21 day response time will start from the date we received that email which is the 24 July.
‘It should be noted that the Council sent the email on the 22 July @8.40am but for reasons I don’t understand it was not received by us until 24 July @ 22.28pm which was unfortunately after I had left for a week’s annual leave; therefore we have not commenced looking at this information, however the 21 day deadline will be back dated to the 24th July.”
‘Following this email, the planning consultant responded expressing disappointment and requesting a response ASAP to which they responded:
‘”My email meant that we had received the consultation not the information and I had not reviewed the council website at that point as I had assumed that it would be on the Council’s website. Notwithstanding, we had not commenced reviewing the information until today, and my previous email re responses times still applies. We are not able to review the information any faster than this as we do not have the resources to do so at the current time, and we do not consider that we have caused a delay.”
‘This is all very frustrating. Information to discharge the condition was submitted on the 7 July, and should have been dealt with by Statutory Consultee, before the 28 July. We are still awaiting a response, and they themselves extended their response time by a further 21 days. All in all, the delays could amount to around 49 days (if they take their back dated 21 days), rather than the 21 days they should have dealt with the information. There appear to be no guarantees that we will even hear within this timescale.‘
