Planning Act 2008 Fourth Anniversary Progress Report

Today's entry reports on the fourth anniversary of the Planning Act 2008 receiving royal assent, rather neatly coinciding with the four hundredth blog entry.

On Wednesday 26 November 2008, Queen Elizabeth II gave her assent to the Planning Act 2008.

For the first time, a single planning and authorisation regime would apply to infrastructure projects across different industry sectors.

The regime was aimed to speed up every aspect of the planning and authorisation process, as follows:

• policy, and need in particular, would be declared in advance to avoid lengthy debates once applications were made;
• pre-application consultation would become compulsory to flush out opposition early, allow changes to be made when the project was less entrenched and (let's be honest) start the clock running later;