Nine councils have avoided being stripped of their planning decision-making powers after drastically improving their performance figures.
Local government secretary Michael Gove wrote to the planning authorities in April to inform them he was minded to hand their powers to the Planning Inspectorate.
The councils were deemed to be guilty of ‘poor performance,’ meaning they were routinely missing the target of deciding 70% of applications within eight weeks and 60% of ‘major’ applications within 13 weeks.
Among them was Epsom and Ewell BC, which had slumped to deciding just 53% of applications in time.
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