In the first article in our Developer’s Playbook series, we looked at changes to the local plan system, the NPPF and discussed the introduction of the national scheme of delegation that changes the way local planning authorities make their decisions. In this, the third article in our series, we discuss the practical importance of understanding who will, or may, decide your planning application and how that should affect the application strategy.
Who decides?
The National Scheme of Delegation, which came into force on 31 October, means that many more applications will be determined by officers but where applications are not in accordance with the local plan or raises an economic, social or environmental issue of significance to the local area, they can be determined by the Planning Committee if the Chief Planning Officer and Chair of the Planning Committee agree. We don’t know what the precise impact of this change will be, but the expectation is that more applications will be determined by officers.
Proposals for stronger mayoral intervention mean that strategic mayors will be able to intervene in certain applications considered significant to the wider city-region, including major housing, employment, infrastructure and regeneration proposals. When that happens, the application is no longer determined solely through the political and spatial perspective of the local planning authority as the mayoral corporation fills that role and does so from the perspective of the wider sub-regional area.
While the legal framework remains broadly the same as the system we are familiar with, in that the application must still be determined in accordance with the development plan unless material considerations indicate otherwise, a key change will be how the test will be applied. A local planning committee is likely to encounter, and arguably consider, a proposal primarily through its effects on a particular place and community. By contrast, a mayor may assess the same scheme against city-regional housing requirements, transport investment, economic objectives and climate priorities. The planning question remains the same, but the lens through which it is considered changes.
If you don’t like the answer, ask someone else
Overlay the Secretary of State’s call-in and recovery powers, following an appeal, and a layered hierarchy emerges. At the bottom sit officer decisions made under nationally shaped delegation arrangements. In the middle sit local planning committees, dealing with a narrower category of applications: those considered too sensitive to delegate but not sufficiently strategic to be determined elsewhere. At the top sit mayors and ministers, intervening in a subset of high-impact and high-visibility proposals.
That hierarchy means that promoters will need to understand who is likely to determine an application, whether that may change, whether they want to lobby for a decision at a different level and which priorities will matter at each level.
That requires five things.
