Pennycook: Sharp uptick of applications… are Councillors ready?
The latest planning application statistics showed that planning application submissions, determinations and permissions all plunged to a record low in the 2024/25 financial year. The number of homes permitted in the year to March 2025 also decreased year-on-year by 2.9 per cent to 235,000.
We all know that development is a frustratingly slow process and the Planning Minister Matthew Pennycook has said he expects a “sharp uptick” in planning application. He said he expected the data for 2024/25 to “still be below the numbers the government needs and the ambition it set” and he “fully expects” to see “very different numbers starting to come through” in the “later half of this year and next year” as the government’s changes to planning policy “start to bear fruit”.
Matthew said in an interview: “Where I will get worried is if, in the later half of this year and into next year, we’re not seeing some of those sharp upticks in planning applications that would be expected as the positive changes start feeding through”.
He also spoke about the government’s intention to start a new National Housing Bank to “accelerate housebuilding across England”, which was announced last Wednesday. The bank would be a government-owned public finance institution within the government’s housing delivery agency Homes England “with the autonomy and freedoms to deploy loans, equity and guarantees to support new housing development”.
He is right, Grey Belt applications have really made a difference and with the Local Plan making now on a ticking clock, the Government really is doing all the right things to get things going (and if you are planning to run a planning application CALL ME!)
The changes to the Planning Committee structures and “National Scheme of Delegation” are still somewhere in the ether… and I very much doubt that the training and certification of Planning Committee Councillors and restructuring will be implemented before these applications start hitting Committees.
Will Councillors be ready to deal with this expected massive increase in their workload? These applications, like Grey Belt are new territory for Planning Committees. Solar Farms and BESS applications used to be something only few dealt with… they are now going to be everywhere.
I have sympathy for the Councillors; the committee meetings will get very long with massive and complicated agendas. Difficult decisions on highly complex sites will have to be measured against new regulations and planning guidance.
My hot tip to any developer is simple: Make sure you communicate with these Councillors and ensure they understand the benefits of your application. COMMUNICATE! With this HUGE workload, things will get touch, so you will have to go the extra mile to ensure the Planning Committee is on side.
Call me, our CCP team is ready to help you ride the wave and bank those consents!
Henry