Housing minister admits planners are facing resourcing difficulties

The housing minister has admitted council planning departments are facing resourcing difficulties but pledged to tackle the issue and “free up planners to be planners”.

Stuart Andrew, speaking at a Building Garden Communities event yesterday, said he has heard the question of whether planners have the resources to deliver initiatives such as garden communities “a lot” since becoming housing minister in February.

Andrew, responding to a question at the event at the Royal Institute of British Architects headquarters in London, said: “I recognise there are constraints and there are difficulties.” He said there are a number of things the government is doing to simplify planning processes.

He said: “It’s taking a ridiculous amount of time to develop a local plan, we want to make it simpler, so those can be done in 30 months rather than in years.

“The second thing is we’ve got a skills strategy that we are starting within the [levelling up, housing and communities] department to look at and identify the issues that exist within local planning authorities.”

The government is also looking to increase planning fees by more than a third for major applications and a quarter for minor applications to try and put more money into the system.

Andrew said: “There will be things in the [levelling up] bill to increase planning fees, so there will be more money, but I recognize that this is an issue at the end of the day. We want to free up planners to be planners.”

Official figures released in December showed the speed of decision-making by councils hitting its lowest point for five years in the third quarter of last year, while a number of housebuilders have cited planning delays as holding back expansion plans.

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Andrew also said the government’s garden communities programme could deliver 320,000 homes by 2050. Under the programme councils are provided with funding to recruit specialist staff to plan community garden projects of between 1,500 and 10,000 homes in size.

Earlier this week the government allocated an extra £15m of garden communities funding, bringing the investment in the programme up to £69m. A total of 43 towns and villages are planned through the scheme.

Andrew said: “With 11 of these new communities situated on previously used land, including former Ministry of Defence and old industrial sites, some of these projects epitomise the kind of brownfield first regeneration that my department is championing.”

Andrew said the scheme is also “helping the housing and construction industry bounce back from the pandemic” through the creation of 200,000 jobs.