Recommendation 18

HM Government Accepted

Highly skilled planners are fundamental to local design and placemaking. They are invaluable in creating communities that people are proud to call home, in beautifully designed places. The government recognises that local authorities, as well as the wider planning sector, face serious capacity and capability challenges which have resulted in delays, including in the processing of planning applications, impacting on homeowners and developers alike. To begin to address this, on 24 July 2023, we announced a commitment to put an additional £37.5 million funding into the system to clear planning backlogs and deploy additional resource to the frontline to unblock major housing developments. This included funding for: • A new £24 million Planning Skills Delivery Fund to help equip local authorities to recruit, retain and upskill planners and to build a more sustainable planning system for the benefit of communities, as well as helping local authorities to clear planning application backlogs. • A new £13.5 million programme that will deploy teams of specialists into local planning authorities, starting with a trailblazing pathfinder in Cambridge. This is in addition to a range of projects within our already established Planning Capacity and Capability programme, which we have developed, working with partners across the planning sector, to ensure that local planning authorities have the skills and capacity they need both now and in the future. This includes funding for developing new pathways into planning through extending and increasing our existing bursaries through £340,000 grant to the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) and £1.6 million to supporting the Local Government Association to develop a new Planning Graduate Programme. It also includes £1 million for the social enterprise Public Practice to help councils recruit and develop skilled planners. We have also recently launched a new skills and resources survey of local authorities in England, which will enable us to understand where our programme will have the greatest impact. Further information of the Planning Capacity and Capability Programme is at this link - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/building-planning-capacity-and-capability. To also help build capacity in local authorities, we have laid draft regulations to increase planning fees by 35 per cent for major applications and 25 per cent for all other planning applications, together with a mechanism to allow for the annual adjustment of fees in line with inflation. These measures will provide much needed additional resourcing and financial sustainability for local planning authorities. The fee increase will help provide additional income for local authorities without introducing disproportionately high fee increases for householders and small businesses who may be more sensitive to charges than major developers. We will continue to keep planning fees under review.