Planners slam 'burden' of Planning Act 2008
New responsibilities placed on local authorities under the Planning Act 2008 and government policy in relation to nationally significant infrastructure projects will bring about additional costs but also a loss of funding, the Planning Officers Society has warned.
In a letter to the planning minister, POS president David Hackforth said John Healey should “accept the argument that the Planning Act 2008 places new burdens on local authorities and take appropriate steps to provide councils with the extra resources needed to discharge these new responsibilities.”
The Society pointed out that most of the national infrastructure proposals were yet to have locations identified in draft national policy statements, and so potentially the additional duties and costs could fall on any local authority in England.
The POS also backed a letter on the issue to the minister from the acting chief executive of Copeland Borough Council in Cumbria.
Fergus McMorrow wrote: “Local authorities are sympathetic to the new regime in general, and want to contribute to its success. Lack of resources may mean that they are unable to fulfil the roles allotted to them and as a result slow down the application process, be unable to give meaningful support or at worst, stand outside the process altogether.”
He warned that this would reduce community engagement and increase the potential for opposition through inadequate knowledge about the project and lack of assessment and mitigation of impacts.
McMorrow said there were four reasons why a “considerable” new burden had been placed on local authorities. These were:
- Local authorities have several new responsibilities in the Planning Act 2008.
- Responsibilities for a particular project extend to a wider group of local authorities
- Local authorities will lose funding
The responsibilities caused by government policy on infrastructure do not apply uniformly, with low-density rural authorities more likely to have to deal with one or more applications, which are much larger than average.
On the new responsibilities under the Act, McMorrow cited the fact that councils were named as statutory consultees for the first time in areas such as energy, transport and waste policy, and have to ensure local people are involved in the development of national policy statements. Local authorities also have a central role in the statutory pre-application consultation regime, he said.
Preparation of ‘local impact reports’ on an application will require a “disproportionate amount of work”, McMorrow added, while councils will also have a role in policing the implementation of development consent orders and development in the absence of a DCO.
These additional burdens come at a time when local authorities could see a loss of funding – with the 2008 Act removing the need for planning permission for nationally significant infrastructure projects, councils will be deprived of the application fee. “The amount lost in this way will be a very small proportion of the financial burden on local authorities loss for larger projects, but nevertheless it adds weight to the new burden argument,” McMorrow pointed out.
He also warned of a disproportionate impact on those authorities which will have to deal with multiple applications because of the various linked projects, such as port development and associated road and rail links.
The Copeland BC acting chief executive said the suggestion that the Act merely formalises best practice was “an insufficient response”.
Calling for an assessment of the financial burden faced by local authorities in meeting their new responsibilities, McMorrow said the cost could be met by developers, the Infrastructure Planning Commission, the government or a combination of all three.
“It is likely that the overall increase will only amount to a small proportion of the estimated £300m annual saving as a result of the introduction of the new regime, and a small proportion of the cost of a project, but it will make a significant difference to the authorities involved and the success of the new regime,” he concluded.
