Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of the (a) performance of and (b) time taken to commence appeals by the Planning Inspectorate.

The Inspectorate has been performing well across a number of key areas such as local plan examinations, nationally significant infrastructure project applications, s62a applications and planning appeals proceeding by hearings and inquiries. The Inspectorate is implementing actions to maintain performance in these areas and to improve end-to-end times for other casework. In the short term those actions are focused around increasing capacity by:

• increasing the available capacity for inspectors/other decision makers by recruiting more. The Inspectorate has significantly increased the number of inspectors it employs over the past 18 months and is on track to recruit additional inspectors later this year;
• using contract (non-salaried) inspectors to the full extent of their availability and expanding the range of casework they determine; and
• training inspectors to handle different casework to increase flexibility.