Festive News: MHCLG publishes new LPA Designation Criteria

It is officially December. Traditionally a time of festivity, novelty jumpers, and more planning news than one can shake a candy cane at! 

Whilst the big news* is yet to come, MHCLG is easing us into the festive season early with:

• A recovered appeal decision granting permission for a new prison against the recommendation of the Planning Inspector; and 
• the publication of updated LPA Designation Criteria - which have now been placed before parliament for approval.

This post takes a quick look at the second of these news items - as there are some interesting comments in explanatory memorandum.

The change proposed to the designation criteria is relatively modest. MHCLG are proposing to reduce the assessment period for “speed of decision-making” from two years down to one.   The stated reason for this change is as follows:

“5.9 The updated Criteria Document has changed the assessment period for speed of decision-making for both major and non-major applications from 24 months to 12 months. Assessing performance across a 12-month period rather than 24 months would not significantly change the number of local authorities at risk of designation, but would allow earlier identification of poor performing authorities so that action can be taken sooner, and it would be more responsive to performance changes.”

More interesting than the change itself, are the comments in section 7 of the explanatory memorandum, which contain the Labour Government's response to the last administration's “Accelerating the Planning System” consultation. 

The good news is:

• MHCLG are NOT going to scrap Extension of Time (EOT) agreements for Planning Applications; and 
•  They are also not going to massively tighten performance criteria on LPAs before the additional resources promised by the government have been provided. 

They have, however, implicitly promised to roll-out the Planning Performance Dashboard, which was published in draft, by the former administration, in March 2024; but never actually finalised.  This Dashboard will be used to proactively monitor the use of EOTs and seek improvements from those LPAs who are seen to be making excessive use of them.

The key paragraphs are set out below:

"7.3  The Accelerated Planning System consultation also consulted on proposals to introduce a new performance measure for speed of decision-making based on the proportion of applications determined against statutory periods only. There was limited support for this proposal by both local planning authorities and developers who prefer the flexibility that Extension of Time agreements can provide if this assists with a achieving a positive of outcome. 32 per cent of respondents supported the proposal and 55 per cent did not (13 per cent did not know). 

7.4 The government plans to invest in local planning authority skills and resourcing by increasing planning fees and through the Department’s Capacity and Capability programme. Introducing new performance metrics or raising thresholds before these resources are in place could risk destabilising local authority planning departments and impact overall service delivery. Therefore, the government does not intend to implement this proposal at present, but will review in the future after additional resources have been introduced their impact on planning performance has been assessed. Instead, the government will focus on enhancing the transparency of planning performance data through the Planning Performance Dashboard. This will allow for the active identification of underperforming local authorities, including authorities who are excessively using Extension of Time agreements and will seek improvements from those authorities."

*The new NPPF, English Devolution, Strategic Planning etc. etc.