Review Of Land Use Planning – Final Report By Kate Barker

The review, driven by HM Treasury, is focused on bringing development forward, mainly by incentivising reuse of land, speeding up planning applications, appeals and plan-making processes and adding weight to policies on economic development. The extent to which the Government is prepared to push through these changes, against some inevitable cost to community involvement and environmental interests, remains to be seen.

All those engaged in the planning system would overwhelmingly identify the slowness and uncertainty of the application, appeal and plan-making processes as the main impediments to economic development. Most of these problems would be solved by the obvious and simple, but politically unpalatable, solution of committing to major funding of local authority planning departments and the Planning Inspectorate (PINS). The Report proposes some, but not sufficient, funding for PINS and the proposals taken together will go some way towards, but will not solve the problems