Reforms announced by the chancellor as part of today’s autumn statement to allow applicants to pay for guaranteed planning timelines
Developers will be able to pay councils to make faster decisions on major schemes under a planning shake-up announced by Jeremy Hunt today.
Under plans announced in the chancellor’s autumn statement, applicants will be offered a “premium planning service” across England requiring local authorities to meet faster timelines.
If councils miss the deadline, they will automatically pay back the fees in a measure described by Hunt as “a prompt service or your money back - just as would be the case in the private sector.”
It is not clear at this stage what criteria will be used to judge schemes’ eligibility or if its scope will include housing, although it is being overseen by the Department of Levelling Up Housing & Communities (DLUHC)
A Treasury spokesperson said the scheme is for “larger, more complex projects with the specifics to be confirmed soon”.
The move aims to improve existing planning performance agreements in councils, said by the Treasury to be a “patchwork approach”.
“It takes too long to approve infrastructure projects and business planning applications.
“Many businesses say they would be willing to pay more if they knew their application would be approved faster,” the chancellor said today in the House of Commons.
The government will also invest £5 million to incentivise greater use of Local Development Orders in England, aiming to end delays for businesses so that key commercial projects secure planning permission faster.
Other planning reforms announced today include removing restrictions on installing heat pumps one metre away from a property boundary and constraints on approving electric vehicle charging points.
A new permitted development right will enable one house to be converted into two homes as long as the exterior of the property is not affected.
Reforms to the process of connecting schemes to the electricity grid will aim to cut waiting times by 90% and offer £10,000 off electricity bills over ten years to people living close to grid infrastructure.
Hunt said the measures, which include an action plan seeking to halve the time it takes to build new grid infrastructure to seven years, will accelerate around £90bn of additional business investment over the next decade.
To stimulate housebuilding, the chancellor pledged £110m of funding to the end of 2024 for nutrient mitigations schemes to unlock around 40,000 homes.
Funding of £132m will be handed to Cambridge, London and Leeds to ease planning backlogs, while Hunt said the government was looking at creating a development corporation in Cambridge to build new homes.
But British Property Federation (BPF) chief executive Melanie Leech said the planned reforms would only be achieved if resourced properly. “We know that two of the biggest blockers to delivering the homes, workplaces and vibrant communities needed across the country are an inefficient planning system and delivery of the right infrastructure,” she said.
“However, the planning system can only work more effectively, and be held to account for delivering swifter outcomes, if it is resourced properly. The planning system has been under-funded for at least a decade and its expertise in handling major projects hollowed out.
“We need a long-term planning skills strategy for local authorities to enable them to determine applications more quickly and make increasingly complex decisions that balance sustainability, heritage and local need.”
And Alistair Watson, UK head of planning and environment at law firm Taylor Wessing, said: “This supposed planning reform announced today won’t bring about the development and the infrastructure that the Government says it wants the real estate sector to deliver. ‘Growth’ requires a well-resourced planning system.”
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