The government’s chief planner has said it will be two years before planning reforms published last summer are brought in, raising questions over whether new stripped-down local plans will be in place before the end of the parliament.

Housing ministry chief planner Joanna Averley told an event hosted by countryside charity CPRE last week that the government intends to bring forward a planning bill before the end of the year to deliver its reforms, but that it would be a “couple of years” before the system was in place.

Last summer the government said once the new system was in place local authorities would have 30 months to draw up new local plans, and that the first of these would be in place before the end of the parliament in, December 2024.

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