The Housing Forum has responded to the Government’s consultation on statutory consultees. We are pleased to see the Government looking for ways to streamline the planning system. All too often, planning applications are delayed by slow responses from statutory consultees, something that we have flagged previously in our research on Streamlining planning to build more homes.
We support the broad approach of both reducing the number of statutory consultees, and reducing the scope for some of the others.. It is important that these proposed reforms, which include higher planning fees to cover statutory consultees’ costs, result in measurable and significant improvements in the speed of engagement of statutory consultees in the planning process. A stronger framework is needed for holding statutory consultees to account if they fail to meet deadlines, or are otherwise failing to support the Government’s agenda of delivering more homes and streamlining the planning process.
You can read our response in full HERE.