Planning Director at the Home Builders Federation, Sam Stafford, reflects on the complexities of the new Planning and Infrastructure Bill and its potential to address the challenges within the planning system, urging a focus on improving resources and addressing existing inefficiencies.

Death, taxes and a new Government tackling the planning system’s complexities by layering on yet more legislation are, one learns as one gets older, three of life’s certainties.

With no little fanfare, a Planning & Infrastructure Bill has been laid before Parliament with the promise of a planning process “that works for the builders, not blockers”, and, freed from “unnecessary bureaucracy, shovels in the ground more quickly”.

The sense of purpose from the Government, as it was in opposition, is positive and nettles not hitherto grasped have now been. The revised NPPF, for example, was certainly bold in relation to housing numbers and Green Belt.

Subject to other breaks on supply being addressed, this boldness could result in an increase in planning applications being submitted this year, but these applications will need to navigate the same creaking processes under the eye of the same number of planning officers. If applications submitted this year are going to make a contribution to the 1.5 million home ambition then they need to be determined this year. It is through that prism that those at the coalface will be reading the new Bill.

A national scheme of delegation that allows officers to approve details when the principle of development has been established will mean fewer applications going to committee and less scope for appeals being upheld when a committee overturns an officer recommendation. That, as well as councillors undergoing training before exercising planning functions, will have an impact on submissions being prepared now if enacted in the short-term.

If locally-set planning fees, which HBF has been wary of, result in fewer vacant posts and more skills within LPAs then that could be of benefit in the near term, but some caveats should be attached to this assertion. There is no talk (as when fees last went up) of commensurate qualitative service improvements and whilst locally-set fees are be reinvested back into the system to speed it up, LPAs will still need to cover the cost of plan-making from a central Town Hall pot.

There is much within the Bill that will likely improve the functionality of the planning system. The Nature Restoration Fund could be the long-awaited solution to the nutrient neutrality imbroglio; Spatial Development Strategies could be the long-awaited solution to distributing unmet need from towns and cities across the wider housing market area; and more muscular Development Corporations could help to deliver the long-awaited next generation of new towns.

These though remain tomorrow’s issues. Planning committees and LPA resources are, it can reasonably be said, the only provisions of immediate relevance to anybody about to submit a planning application next week.

Today’s issues are statutory consultees, gremlins in the BNG system, getting highways adopted, foul sewerage connection, and so on, and so on...

Yes, of course, there is a need for lofty, laudable legislative ambitions for a more effective and efficient planning system, but let us not lose sight of the very many practical issues that can be addressed today without it.