District council leaders have welcomed a proposal that could see an increase in planning fees to help over-stretched local planning departments.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (DLUHC) yesterday launched a consultation that outlines the Government’s aim to ‘create a more consistent, streamlined and digitally enabled approach to the way planning applications are made and processed’.

Drawing on input from The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), Local Government Association (LGA) and the British Property Federation (BPF), the consultation concluded that local planning authorities are facing a lack of resources and staff.

The consultation proposes increasing the fees councils charge developers to adjudicate on their plans by 35% for major applications and 25% for minor applications.

It also proposes the creation of a working group with representatives from local government, the private sector and professional bodies to deliver a programme of support to build capacity and capability across planning authorities.

The District Councils’ Network (DCN) welcomed the proposed fee increases.

‘This is an essential boost to our over-stretched planning departments that have experienced increasing workloads but fewer resources as a result of fees not keeping pace with demand,’ said DCN Finance spokesperson Cllr Peter Fleming.

‘With overall council budgets under pressure many authorities have been unable to give their planners the support they need.’

However, Cllr Fleming argues that the Government should go further.

‘Whilst the proposals to raise fees are welcomed, we would like to see the Government go further to give us the freedom to recover the full cost of adjudicating on planning applications and to give greater local discretion to district councils when setting their budgets to ensure these services can flourish long into the future.’

The consultation also proposes introducing more methods for assessing the performance of planning authorities. It says feedback from industry representatives such as the Home Builders Federation and the Federation of Master Builders suggests the time taken to get a planning application decided ‘consistently takes much longer than the statutory period.’

It proposes a tightening of the Planning Guarantee which allows for an applicant to secure a refund of the planning fee where a planning decision has not been made within 26 weeks of submitting an application.

This would mean that where the statutory determination period is eight weeks the Planning Guarantee should be set at 16 weeks and where the statutory determination period is 13 weeks the Planning Guarantee should be 26 weeks.

The consultation also proposes that the performance of a local planning authority for speed of decision making should be assessed on the percentage of applications that are determined within the statutory determination period, not an agreed extended period of time.

Cllr Fleming opposed the introduction of more ‘onerous’ performance indicators.

‘We are concerned that the Government is proposing even more performance indicators when planning departments are already subject to numerous measures which are publicly available. We need to makes sure that any increase in planning fees isn’t swallowed up by a time-consuming and onerous reporting requirements.’