The Government consults on measures to speed up planning

1) Accelerated Planning Service (APS): The introduction of a new Accelerated Planning Service, as announced by the Chancellor in the Autumn Statement 2023, would offer a new application route with accelerated decision dates for major commercial applications over 1,000 sq.m. and fee refunds where these are not met;

2) Extension of Time: Changes in relation to extensions of time agreements, including a new performance measure for speed of decision-making against statutory time limits, and an end to the use of extension of time agreements for householder applications and repeat agreements for the same application for other types of application;

3) Appeals: An expansion of the current simplified householder and minor commercial appeal service for more written representation appeals; and

4) Section 73B: Detail on the broadening of the ability to vary a planning permission through section 73B applications and on the treatment of overlapping planning permissions.

JLL delves in deeper to understand the implications of the new Accelerated Planning Service and the proposed Section 73B here.

On the face of it, the new APS sounds hugely appealing. A new express lane for major commercial development that will guarantee a decision within 10 weeks or your money back. However, there are a number of questions around how this will operate and whether it will deliver the desired outcome.

The broad idea is that the applicant would pay a higher application fee which would be used by the Local Planning Authority to provide additional resource to ensure the application is determined within 10 weeks. If those timescales are not met, the applicant would receive either a partial or full refund of the application fee.

In order to meet the deadline all consultee responses would need to have been received by the LPA, which would include internal Council consultees as well as external statutory consultees such as the Environment Agency. The obvious concern would be that if an application was approaching the 10-week determination date with some responses outstanding, the LPA will simply refuse permission to avoid having to refund the fee.

To avoid this outcome, applicants would need to spend longer in the pre-app stage in detailed consultation with the Local Planning Authority and all statutory consultees to ensure the submission is as complete as possible.

This will likely require a substantially longer pre-application process and there is no guarantee that statutory consultees will engage in pre-application discussions.

If successful, the APS should, in time, result in a higher quality service resulting in experienced planning officers processing major commercial developments. 

There are limitations to the service - it doesn’t include residential developments, or any development that requires an EIA or is subject to habitat regulations assessment, within the curtilage of a listed building, scheduled monument or World Heritage Site or relates to minerals development. 

Perhaps the most interesting element of the proposed broadening of the ability to vary a planning permission is the explicit desire of Government to address overlapping planning permissions. The use of what are often termed “drop-in” permissions to amend an element of a larger multi-phased scheme has been severely limited as a result of recent case law (Hillside¹ and Dennis² ), which all but eliminate the ability to amend part of a larger scheme through the use of a drop-in permission without jeopardising the rest of the development.

The new Section 73B would add a new method of amending existing permissions to complement the existing non-material amendments (S.96a) and minor material amendment (S.73) applications. Section 73B would introduce the ability to make wider ranging amendments so long as the amended development would not be “substantially different” to the originally consented scheme.

By seeking to address this issue head-on, the Government clearly appreciates the implication these recent judgments have had on further limiting the flexibility of the planning system to handle large, complex multi-phased developments.

To discuss how this update impacts you or any other planning matter, please contact the team.

^{[1] Hillside Parks Ltd v Snowdonia National Park Authority [2022] UKSC 30
[2] R (Dennis) v London Borough of Southwark [2024] EWHC 57}