The London Legacy Development Corporation is to introduce fees for providing pre-application planning advice for the first time. It will charge up to £9,500 for a single session for large schemes.

Councils have been allowed to charge developers and householders for pre-application advice for well over a decade. But the LLDC – which was created oversee the regeneration of east London’s 2012 Olympics site and its surroundings – is not a council, and charging powers were only extended to development corporations earlier this year.

Members of the LLDC’s planning decisions committee gave their backing last week to a new schedule of fees that the corporation’s director of planning policy can adopt once they have been advertised locally for three weeks.

…