Waverley Borough Council has received formal confirmation from the Minister of State for Housing and Planning, Rachel Maclean MP, that the council will not be designated for its planning performance.
In May this year, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the Rt Hon Michael Gove MP, wrote to the council, noting that planning performance for determining non-major planning applications within 8 weeks (or an agreed extension), had fallen below the Government’s rolling two-year target of 70%.
Planning performance at the council suffered in 2021 and early 2022, due to a range of issues including the effects of the pandemic, higher application numbers, problems with a new planning IT system and the ongoing, extremely tight labour market for qualified planning officers. The council monitors its planning performance on a continuous basis and had implemented an action plan to deal with the backlog of applications. Mr Gove acknowledged the council’s improvement and stated that he would closely monitor performance up to June 2023.
Writing to the council this week, Mrs Maclean said she had reviewed the actions the council had taken to improve performance over consecutive quarters from October 2022 to June 2023, and was pleased to note that performance on the rolling two-year average (71%), and in the most recent quarter to June 2023 (97%) were above the required threshold. She was therefore content not to designate the authority for poor performance.
Waverley Borough Council Portfolio Holder for Planning & Regeneration and Economic Development, Councillor Liz Townsend, said:
“This is a real credit to the planning team at Waverley and the way they have pulled together and worked extremely hard over the last 18 months. We recognised that our performance levels had dipped and opted to tackle this head on by working in partnership with the Planning Advisory Service to improve our performance, streamline our internal processes and resolve the issues with our IT system. This has resulted in a significant uplift in performance, and we continue to make headway in reducing the backlog of applications.
“Recruitment and retention will remain a significant challenge for us. The nationwide shortage of qualified planning officers and the cost of living crisis has had a serious impact in our area. However, together with our action plan, we have recently appointed an extremely experienced Executive Head of Planning Development to lead the team, and we are implementing a series of actions to help us continue to recruit the planners we need, to build on the strengths of our planning service and continue to maintain and improve our performance.”