A heavy burden

The Infrastructure Planning Commission has taken responsibility for large-scale infrastructure planning applications, but its chief executive admits that there will still be a significant demand on local authority resources. Gareth Pinwell explains why this is the case.

The new Infrastructure Planning Commission has been operating since 1 October 2009 and has recently announced the first list of projects that are to be considered. On 9 November the first draft of the National Policy Statements were also released for consultation. These statements are the key policies against which schemes will be considered at a national level.

What is of interest is the role that the local planning authority will have to play in the determination of applications and, following their determination, the supervision of applications to ensure they are constructed in accordance with the relevant consent.

The Planning Act 2008 places a statutory duty upon developers to carry out consultation with relevant local authorities and any persons with an interest in the site, and to prepare a consultation strategy with the local authorities as to how they will consult with people living in the vicinity of the site.

This raises significant issues:

• Who will meet the cost and the resources of the local authority to become involved in this process?
• Is there potentially a conflict of interest here when a local authority has to be involved in a consultation strategy, when in its capacity as a local authority it may have strong reservations in respect of the proposals and will through its elected members seek to raise the strongest objection? These two roles seem incompatible.
• How will the local authority be seen to be objective to its community if it in effect sets up the consultation process with the developer?

Statements from the minister, John Healey, indicate that the government does not intend to provide any additional funding to councils to assist with this role.

One possible way for authorities to consider obtaining funding is to consider planning performance agreements as a way to obtain funding.

Once the consultation phase is over, the application is made to the commission and then there will be a further phase of consultation with interested parties, very much akin to the consultation carried out on major planning applications.

The local authority has to prepare a local impact report which it presents to the commission. Those opposed to the application can call for the local authority to reflect their concerns in the report. It is easy to see that for contentious application this could consume significant resources.

The matter will then be determined with a range of public hearings where the views of the relevant local authorities and objectors will be considered.

If the project is approved, the supervision of compliance with any conditions imposed by the consent will rest with the local authority. In the case of these significant projects this is likely to place a severe burden on the resources of the local authority.

This burden has been anticipated by the IPC’s chief executive, Sir Michael Pitt, who commented: “Rural authorities may struggle considerably. It is going to put a strain on smaller councils.”

The reality is that the system will place an extra burden on councils regardless of their size. It will be interesting to see how these matters develop as the process of determining applications proceeds.

Gareth Pinwell is a partner in Foot Anstey’s regulatory and advocacy team. He can be contacted on 01752 675515 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.