For Anna Highfield
A “recruitment crisis” in local planning authorities has created a bottleneck which is holding back the progress of projects, a Local Government Association (LGA) planning expert has claimed.
Head of the LGA’s Planning Advisory Service (PAS), Anna Rose, said a “pay war” was among recruitment issues leaving planning departments woefully understaffed and unable to process applications quickly enough, as he has reported. Construction News’ German magazine Architects Magazine.
The comments come in the wake of new data released by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) which reveals the number of architecture practices seeing projects abandoned due to planning delays has tripled compared to 2021 .
According to the institute’s latest Future Trends report, 22% of architectural firms have been told to abandon projects in the past three months “due to delays in processing planning applications” , compared to just 7% in April 2021.
Rose said that while many local authorities had funding for the posts, they were struggling to fill the posts. “There just aren’t the people in the planning department to do the job,” he said.
“[Authorities] either you don’t get anyone to apply or the people they are nominating get carried away [elsewhere] before you’ve even taken the [council] job People just don’t want to work in local government planning.”
Rose, who also chairs Public Practice, which places architects and designers in local planning departments, said planning departments suffered a “maximum exodus” after the lockdown and have struggled to recruit since then, leaving resources “probably at their hardest ever.” .
At the same time, he added, the authorities’ “finite resources” were being strained by a large increase in “smaller-level applications” submitted during the lockdown, which prevented the timely processing of larger applications and led to project delays and slower starts. on the spot.
According to the RIBA report, almost half of architecture practices (47%) have had some projects delayed by six months or more due to planning, compared to 30% in 2021.
Only 15% of practices surveyed reported no project delays, compared to 22% in 2021.
Describing the survey results as “alarming”, Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) chief executive Victoria Hills said the data “illustrates the consequences of neglecting our planning departments”.
Hills said: “Chronic under-resourcing is straining our local planning authorities, leaving them struggling to meet public expectations and support the delivery of much-needed housing and infrastructure.”
The RIBA said it was pressing the government to “invest in building the capacity of local authority planning departments” and to allocate “additional resources to recruit and retain planning professionals”.
But Rose said there was no “quick fix” to the problem. As well as the money, he said, planning authorities needed a strong strategy for how to use it, as well as planning reforms to create “more efficiency” in the planning system, “which will make it easier to process applications for planning”, reducing the burden on local government.
Joanne Neville, regional head of planning at land and property regeneration company Haworth, also stressed the importance of local authorities having “up-to-date local plans” as well as the provision of “specific expert” resources to deal with the large scale planning. applications
It called for “bigger penalties” for authorities that “fail to meet the required service standards or continuously delay the preparation of the plan”.
“[We are] increasingly seeing delays in the planning process caused by politicized agendas, which is putting huge pressure on the delivery of much-needed housing, jobs and infrastructure,” he said.
“A balance must be struck, and we believe that legislating to increase local community power in design and decision-making risks introducing further delays in the planning process and allowing decisions to be made in local level that harm the wider economic area.
“The transfer of planning powers to regions or mayoral authorities would allow strategic decisions to be made to boost economic growth between regions, taking into account the needs and aspirations of local communities.”
