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Today's entry reports on a forthcoming consultation on
combining consents and an impact assessment of the Growth and
Infrastructure Bill.
One stop shop
The government is expected to launch a consultation on extending
the 'one stop shop' concept for the Planning Act 2008
regime next Thursday, 22 November. My blog post back in January
called for changes such as this, so I am expecting good news.
At present there are four types of consent as far as the
Planning Act is concerned:
ones where the Planning Act regime replaces them, e.g. planning
permission - there are 11 of these
ones where an outside consent can be included in a Planning Act
application, but only if the original consenting body agrees
ones that were put in the Planning Act itself as a check
against the then Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC), and
any other consent, which general powers allow to be modified in
an application
The Localism Act 2011 allowed the first category to be extended
(or reduced) via secondary legislation, although no such
legislation has appeared yet. The consultation could involve
adding consents to that category, but I think it is more likely to
focus on the second category. At present, 42 consents in
England and 78 in Wales are in the category by virtue of a list in
regulations made under the
Planning Act. I think that the consultation will involve
deciding which consents could be taken out of the list (thereby
putting them in the fourth category above).
As far as the third category above is concerned, the Growth and
Infrastructure Bill is already slimming down special parliamentary
procedure (SPP) and I am hopeful that it will be amended during its
passage through parliament to remove some of the sections that
require further certificates to be obtained in the Planning
Act. The one stop shop consultation might include these as
well.
Impact assessment
Meanwhile, the government has produced an impact assessment of the
Growth and Infrastructure Bill. Incidentally, the Department
of Communities and Local Government website moved to the
overarching www.gov.uk website yesterday, so any
old links on my blog and elsewhere won't work any more.
The impact assessement - you might say the 'lamppost'
for the bill - sets out costs and savings of the various elements
of the Bill. It reveals, for example, that around 90
applications a year are expected to benefit from the 'special
measures' provision in the first clause of the bill, where
applications can be made directly to the Planning Inspectorate for
some authorities regarded as failing in their planning decision
functions.
For the slimming down of SPP, the impact assessment says that
two current applications under the Planning Act could suffer the
same fate as the Rookery South project (latest: the joint committee
didn't sit this week). It estimates that between 10 and
20 business and commercial projects might use the regime per year
if it was extended to them, and has a list of types of project that
might be consulted upon as follows:
Warehousing and storage
Manufacturing and processing proposals
Office development, including research and development
facilities
Extractive industries (mining and quarrying)
Major tourism proposals and leisure venues
Mixed -use developments (where this includes two or more of the
above uses but does not include housing)
I'm not sure when that consultation is coming out, but it is
supposed to be during the passage of the bill. There is also
a hint about the size threshold, namely 10,000 square metres of
floorspace or 2 hectares or more of site area. Interestingly,
this is the same threshold as the government is expected to
introduce for the general duty of pre-application consultation for
planning applications under the Localism Act 2011, not yet in
force.
Luckily (well probably on purpose, in fact), the Planning
Inspectorate is gearing up for an increased number of
projects. In answer to a written
question by shadow planning minister Roberta
Blackman-Woods, planning minister Nick Boles said that the number
of staff in the national infrastructure directorate would rise from
87.8 in 2012-3 to 134.1 in 2013-4 - more than a 50% increase.
The total was 52 in 2011-2 within the IPC, who seemed to prefer
whole people.
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