Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what assessment he has made of the performance of his Department against targets for the processing of new planning applications.

Planning law sets out the statutory time period for determining a planning application as 13 weeks for a major application and 8 weeks for a minor application (unless an Environmental Impact Assessment is required, in which case the statutory period is 16 weeks) – unless a longer period has been agreed in writing with the applicant.

The Government's live tables p151 and p152 set out local planning authorities' speed and quality of decision-taking against these statutory timeframes, for major applications. The Government has also recently published data on local planning authorities' timeliness in determining minor applications in live tables p153 and p154. The live tables are available at www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-planning-application-statistics.

Our reforms to simplify and speed-up the application process, and to deal with the few cases where planning authorities are under-performing, are having a positive effect on decision times. For example 77% of major applications were determined on time in October to December 2014, compared with 57% in July to September 2012.