District planners back on track (From Gazette Series)

District planners back on track

DISTRICT planners are now exceeding Government planning targets after figures for the last quarter showed they were missing them.

Figures for the year ending in September show that Stroud District Council determined 53.5 percent of its major planning applications within the Government's recommended 13-week period. The figures placed the council 253rd in the table of UK local authorities for dealing with major applications. There are 352 local councils with responsibility for planning featured in the ranking.

But since the figures for the last quarter were published the district council has dramatically improved.

Cllr Barbara Tait, the authority's cabinet member for planning, said: "These figures of course are for the last quarter and we have improved enormously. On major applications we are determining 75 percent, the government target is 70 percent, and on minor applications we are determining 83 percent where the government is 80 percent.

"We feel on other applications, which are the smaller applications, we are still slightly behind but this is why we are looking at the scheme of delegation to see how we can tighten it up a bit.

"We are working really hard at this. We have this improvement plan in place and now we have the adopted local plan we should be able to negotiate with developers more and that is going to make a lot of difference."

Across the country Local Planning authorities (LPAs) are continuing to improve performance and are responding to the Government's drive to deliver a quality, customer-focussed planning service.

To improve performance in this area ODPM is offering additional funding to the Planning Advisory Service and Advisory Team on Large Applications to expand their support programmes for under-performing LPAs.

Housing and Planning Minister Yvette Cooper said: "High quality planning services are vital to delivering sustainable communities. I am encouraged to see that performance is improving across the board."

"LPAs have improved their planning performance with more applications being decided quickly, however we know more still needs to be done both to speed up the process and ensure a high quality planning service that reaches sensible decisions in the interest of the community. That is why we are supporting further reform to the planning system including a new review by Kate Barker of planning for economic development."