Privatising planning by the back door

The Government has fired the starting gun on the privatisation of the planning system. Thinly veiled to speed up the planning process, developers in a few pilot areas will be able to choose who processes their planning application. A good idea or not? And will developers bite?

Most recent governments have been either privatising through the front or back door. Energy, telecoms, even the air sea and rescue services – and a few more that are sure to be announced in the forthcoming budget!

Finally the politicians have found a backdoor way to privatise planning, under the guise of creating more efficiency and speeding up planning applications, guaranteed to get a headline and the support of developers!

it goes like this “competing authorities” and “government approved organisations” will be allowed to process planning applications outside their own administrative areas. Supposedly this will be an incentive for local planning departments to speed up their consideration of applications or risk applicants choosing a competitor.  The sting in the tail is that fees for applications can be varied by competing authorities” and “government approved organisations

With resources already pared to the bone in most planning authorities, the chances that they will become “competing” local authorities is slim – apart from of course those authorities who have already outsourced their planning functions! So watch out small district councils – localism is coming!

The saving grace for localism is that the decisions will still be made by the local planning authority via their planning committee, “a pillar of democracy”. Unless, of course, they are made by the Inspector, but we’ll come back to that.

But will it work?

it may well be attractive to some developers to get a “competing authority” to process their application, especially if the authority (or government approved provider) has a positive development led attitude and a track record of determining applications within the 8/13 week time frames. Given the close working relationships between some developers and some multidisciplinary practices ( re; government approved providers) transparency and pecuniary interest declarations need to be looked at closely – to say nothing of the extent to which they may be excluded from freedom of information requests!
Developers tempted to employ competing authorities or other agencies might want to pause; a disconnected committee, presented with recommendation by planning officers threatened with redundancy having to make a decision on an application they haven’t had a chance to scrutinise? Not to mention ward councillors who may have been briefed by applicants and communities but who have not been able to discuss the detail and process with their own officers. Localism in action!

And just think of the implications for appeals – I’ll be talking about that in the next article !

 

 

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