Householder PP to become much harder to obtain?

[Equus]

Venom said:

And the other catch being, of course, whether the statutory consultees can service that accelerated timescale. In my experience, most are struggling with the current resource demand.

Don't worry: the whole 'Accelerated Planning Service' is a red herring: it's there so that Rishi can tell the gullible public that he's introducing measures that will help speed up the planning process, whilst what he'll actually be doing is slowing it down further.

The TL:DR version* is that they would be accelerating 1,640 applications per year, whilst slowing down (or refusing) over 68,000 others.

Venom said:

...we're just getting more of the same tinkering which adds yet another layer of chaff to the process, and helps no-one other than a politician in Whitehall say they've done 'something' to fix the system.

Depending on whether or not your tinfoil hat works, it either proves that the Government is monumentally stupid and incapable of drawing even the most basic inferences from their own statistics, or else that they're really quite clever, politically speaking, and are playing a 3-card trick that the majority of the public will fall for without question.

Neither conclusion puts them in a good light, though, really.






* If you want the actual numbers to support it:

• By the Government's own admission, the number of applications that will fall within the scope of the proposed 'Accelerated Planning Service' totaled 1,640 last year. That's just five applications per Authority, per year, on average.
• The total number of applications received averages 369,868, per year (1,128 per Authority, on average)
• In other words, they are imposing accelerated targets for less than half a percent of applications.

Meanwhile....

• They propose withdrawing the ability to agree an extension of time on Householder applications.
• There are 115 times as many Householder applications (189,109 nationally... an average of 582 per Authority, per year, if you want to be accurate) as there are 'major commercial applications' fitting the criteria for the Accelerated Planning Service.
• Of these Householder applications, 44% currently take longer than the statutory 8 week determination period, and of those, 36% currently utilise 'extensions of time' (the rest are by Authorities who simply ignore the statutory determination period and allow applications to run over time without agreeing an EoT).
• Even if you just use the 36% figure, that works out to a shade over 68,000 applications per Authority, per year, that will need to be refused, if LPA's no longer have the option of extending their determination timescales.

All the above statistics (with the exception of the 1,640 figure for 'major commercial applications', which is from the Government consultation linked in the OP) are from the Government's own statistics, HERE.