If you are involved they are terrible, but if you are just observing they are terrific.
If you are reading a town planning-based blog then the chances are that you will have participated in a planning committee previously, will know immediately what I mean, and will have your own tales to tell. If you are not a planner though or have not been subject to this unique ‘cauldron of human emotion’ (which is what I called Episode 7) then you should watch Wokingham’s planning committee take over an hour to debate the merits of a proposed communications kiosk in Woodley recently (I only knew about this because I saw somebody last week who had to sit through this discussion whilst waiting for the next application, but you could probably pick any planning committee at any council on any day of the year and see something similar). Yes, of course, not all planning committees are akin to putting the fate of a transformative regeneration scheme or a regionally significant infrastructure project in the hands of a cast of characters better suited to roles in the Vicar of Dibley, but many are…
The still new Government’s fresh eyes have rightly then, in this observer’s humble opinion at least, identified that the role of the planning committee is worthy of scrutiny and, in the context of “accelerating housebuilding and infrastructure delivery”, will include in a forthcoming Planning & Infrastructure Bill measures to ‘modernise’ committees in order to ‘improve local planning decision making’.
Before contemplating how this might be achieved I humbly offer some observations as to why this is desirable, and some themes and trends that may have led us to where we are.
The Localism Act 2012 appeared halfway through my career far and, for the purposes of this blog, divides it neatly into two halves. This is just a sense, of course, but before 2012 I would fancy that if an applicant secured the recommendation of an officer then they could be about 70% sure of a positive decision at committee. In the period since 2012 my sense is that even with an officer recommendation an applicant would now sit down at the start of a meeting thinking that the decision could go either way. 50:50. The toss of the coin. Let's see which way the wind is blowing...
Why so? Well the Coalition Government of course put ‘communities in control’ and as the role of the committee became more prominent the need to understand and engage with the committee became more prominent, a corollary of which has been the public affairs consultant taking a more central role with the project team.
There are other factors at play, of course. Applications, as it is well reported (see, for example, this report from Lichfields), are much more complicated now, which means that they are much more expensive, heightening the jeopardy for applicants. The consequence of that is that applications are also much more difficult for officers to transact. Even without the scrutiny afforded by objectors, committee reports can extend to dozens and dozens of pages, and easily into the hundreds in order to bullet-proof them against the prospect of a judicial review? How much more officer time does it take, one wonders, to transact an application that has to go to committee?
Further, it is worth noting that if committee processes and protocols have not kept pace with the complexity of planning law and policy then they certainly have not kept pace with the complexity and contentiousness of the social media landscape, and the fact, when it comes to public opinion, material available on the local Facebook group's page is of much more influence than the material available on the council's web page.
I wonder too whether the straitjacket on local government has played a role in the politicisation of the planning committee. There are so many statutory obligations on councils and so little financial wiggle room for anything else that it seems almost impossible to imagine many if indeed any councillors inviting people to vote for them so that they can actually make something happen. In that context it is logical and indeed sadly inevitable that councillors invite people to vote for them so that they can stop something happening. On which committee is a councillor more like to make a name for themselves? Overview & Scrutiny or Planning? I generalise, obviously, but the point is a valid one.
Whether or not any or all of that had anything to do with it or not, there was a discernible trend a few years ago for applications on allocated sites to be refused at committee against an officer recommendation and for subsequent appeals to be upheld. On top then of the officer time that it takes to transact an application that has to go to committee is the time that PINS spend transacting the subsequent appeal. According to Lichfields, when an application is refused in accordance with an officer recommendation, appeals are allowed on 46% of occasions, but when when an application is refused against an officer recommendation, appeals are allowed on 79% of occasions.
This may or may not have had something to do with Michael Gove including within a letter sent to all Council Leaders and Chief Executives in September 2023 (who remembers the ‘Long Term Plan for Housing’..?) an expectation that “development should proceed on sites that are adopted in a local plan with full input from the local community unless there are strong reasons why it cannot”.
So, on the basis that more often than not everybody involved (officers, members, applicants and the general public) leaves a planning committee at best dissatisfied and at worst bewildered, they are evidently ripe for modernising. But how?
The Planning Advisory Service (PAS) is presently looking to gather information about how planning committees are operating to help inform thinking about what a modern, effective operation looks like (if you work for a LPA and have not yet filled in the PAS survey please find a link to it here). In pulling the survey together and having seen some of the preliminary submissions Shelly Rouse at PAS has published some of the top characteristics of an effective planning committee, which can be found here. Shelly’s ‘top tips’, excellent though they are, are largely behavioural and procedural, so what measures, going beyond working to improve behaviours and procedures, might a Planning & Infrastructure Bill include to modernising committees by law.
There are perhaps four areas to consider...
The first is an old chestnut that is to improving planning committees what PPAs are to cracking the resources nut, which is mandatory training. When thinking about the role of the councillor from a compliance / audit / good governance point of view it does seem somewhat peculiar that anybody is allowed to hold in their hands the fate of a multi-million pound development project without even the barest understanding of the planning process, so this very much represents the ‘low-hanging fruit' option. It does of course though beg the questions as to who provides the training, on what and how frequently, and should councillors at least have to pass some kind of test at the end of it.
The second avenue to explore is whether, again by law, applications of a certain size and scale should be determined by a smaller group of councillors (speaking to Shelly’s point about planning committees having an important role in delivering the ambitions of a council this group would include the most senior members) and that could perhaps even include some non-political, co-opted committee members with a specialism in planning and development.
Fourth is the possibility of a national scheme of delegation.
At present every council has it’s own scheme of delegation and given the myriad reasons why a council decides that a decision should be made by a committee rather than delegated to officers, as outlined in this PAS blog, it is not unreasonable to assume that every single scheme of delegation across the country is different.
Here are some examples (which I collated a year or so ago so may not be entirely up-to-date now, but you will get the point).
In Cumberland all applications accompanied by an Environmental Statement; of more than 100 dwellings or exceeding 2ha; and for development that in the opinion of the Head of Planning is of strategic significance will go to committee.
In Durham all major applications go to committee.
In Sheffield applications go to committee if the decision would be in conflict with a substantial number of representations made on planning grounds and where the outcome is not clearly predetermined by approved planning policy.
On the Wirral applications for 200 homes go to committee, as well as any application called in by a councillor (based upon reasonable planning grounds) and any application that has attracted a petition with 25 signatories or 15 individual objections.
In Harborough applications for 25 or more dwellings go to committee, as well as any application called in by a resident’s local councillor (or the councillor for an adjoining ward if a local councillor is unavailable).
In Reading and Portsmouth all major development goes to committee.
In Eastleigh applications go to committee if, in the opinion of service director, they have a significant impact, are controversial or are potentially controversial, or if three members of the local area committee object to it.
In Reigate & Banstead applications with net increases of more than one dwelling go to committee.
So what might a national scheme of delegation look like?
Firstly, there could be a base number of objections that any application would need to receive in order to be presented to committee if an officer was recommending it for approval. This could be 10, or 15, or perhaps even a percentage (0.1?) of the council’s population.
Beyond that, and in the case, for example, of residential development, there are some who might argue that applications of a certain size should not be presented to committee (less than 10, 20, or 40, for example), perhaps linked to whether the site in question is previously-developed or not. The case against such a threshold would though be that it rubs up against the democratic oversight of decisions that, for example, two planners might take different views on or that have attracted legitimate public interest.
Going back to that trend for applications on allocated sites to be refused at committee against an officer recommendation, which was probably the trigger for this round of conversations about how to modernise the process, no scheme of delegation actually takes into account whether or not the principle of development has already been established. It must surely be right that the threshold at which an application on an allocated site or one consistent with the local plan is taken to committee is considerably higher than an application that might not be consistent with a plan. It must also surely be right that the threshold for taking reserved matters submissions to committee is higher than other applications.
These examples are, to my unsophisticated mind, the source of most frustration with the operation of committees and so where the introduction of any new national scheme of delegation should focus.
Who is likely to support such a proposition? Planners certainly, but it should also find favour with the type of policy wonks that have taken to criticising the planning system because of it’s ‘discretionary’ nature. If the principle of development can be dealt with once (be it by way of allocation and outline consent or even a LDO or a PiP), and more of the subsequent details can be delegated to officers, which dealing with these byzantine schemes of delegation would do, it would expedite starts on site without having to endure any more talk about moves towards a more ‘zonal’ system.
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