Communities Secretary Hazel Blears, Business Secretary John Hutton and Housing and Planning Minister Caroline Flint announced a further planning system review on 25 March 2008.  This newly appointed review will examine the planning application process, from pre-application through to the discharge of conditions and commencement of construction.  

The review will be carried out by Joanna Killian (Chief Executive of Essex County Council) and David Pretty (former Group Chief Executive of Barratt Developments plc).

The review aims to:

• examine what can disrupt the progress of an application 
• make recommendations to improve the process, for example by:
• reducing requirements for the duplication of paperwork in the application process;
• reducing delays occurring after permission has been granted due to the discharge of conditions or the finalisation of legal agreements;
• enabling councils to make better use of technology like the internet to notify people about planning applications, in addition to more traditional ways of telling the public such as in libraries and on notice boards.

Importantly, CLG has undertaken that the review:

will not seek to shift the balance of decision making, weaken important safeguards, or reduce public consultation.

Access the Review

As yet the review does not have its own website.

• Click here for a link to the CLG web pages supporting the review.

Interim RTPI position

The RTPI had anticipated this review as being part of the government's response to recommendations in the Barker 2 report.  Our starting point has been one of initial support for a review seeking to identify and smooth away avoidable obstacles in the development management process.  To this extent it is a matter of some regret that initial publicity for the review from government appears to characterise process delays and inefficiencies as being within the local government domain, when many are in fact the product of government regulatory requirements over which local planning authorities have little discretion. Credit must be given for the significant performance of local government in delivering increased decision speed to respond to the government's best value target regime hitherto.  Regard must also be had to the fact that performance to that target regime has created some perverse incentives for delay or under-resourcing in parts of the planning 'supply-chain'.

In initially responding to the review, the RTPI made clear that whilst it is important that decisions are made promptly, the planning system should be judged by the quality of its outcomes, not just the speed with which those outcomes are delivered. The products of planning decisions, places and spaces and the buildings and landscapes that form them typically last for generations. Ultimately, their worth will be measured against their value to the community over their lifespan, not whether individual buildings gained approval in eight weeks or twelve. In the initial view of the RTPI policy team, it will be a regressive step if, at the end of this review, we end up with another set of time-based performance indicators and no thought given to how to assess the value of the final decision.  In this respect, it is important and heartening to note that RTPI and CLG are currently collaborating on a research project to examine the scope for developing measures of outcome quality.  This research should provide a useful input to the Killian-Pretty Review.

There is room to streamline applications and improve the decision making process.  The RTPI matches the Government’s desire to reduce paperwork and would welcome a more proportional approach to planning, which removes some forms of minor development from the planning process. In the RTPI’s submission to the Barker review we called on government to make it easier for householders and businesses to make improvements to their properties by scrapping the need to gain planning permission for minor works which have little or no impact on neighbours. We believe this approach warrants further examination and it will be most important to ensure that the review team makes the connections between the volume of planning cases in the system, the scope of permitted development and the need for well-resourced planning teams, as contributers to better development management.

The success of this review relies on a thorough understanding of the current system. Being able to engineer improvements by removing unnecessary planning controls and improving the management and flow of information is the key. Producing a raft of time-based targets that are blind to the quality of the outcome is not.

Get involved

As yet, the review has no formal timetable for stakeholder involvement.  The RTPI contacted the review secretariat on the date of the announcement and offered to assist the review.  We hope to update this web page shortly with the steps that we will be taking and the means that members can contribute to these.

In the interim, if you have any thoughts that could assist the development of the RTPI's policy position:

• Click here to email the policy team

Author:

Rynd Smith

Publisher:

The Royal Town Planning Institute

Date:

01-Apr-08

Categories:

Practice, Policy 

Sections:

The RTPI , What Planning Does

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