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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what estimate his Department has made of the cost to the economy of the time taken to process planning applications.

The Department published a study in 2009, Benchmarking the costs to applicants of submitting a planning application (http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120919132719/http:/www.communities.gov.uk/documents/planningandbuilding/pdf/benchmarkingcostsapplication.pdf), which sought to identify the typical financial costs to applicants associated with the submission of a planning application. Local planning authority expenditure on development control, which includes the costs of advice, the processing of applications, enforcement and regulations of other special topics, including minerals and waste control, is recorded by the Department in a statistical dataset published annually Local authority revenue expenditure and financing England: 2014 to 2015 individual local authority data – outturn - RO5 (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/local-authority-revenue-expenditure-and-financing-england-2014-to-2015-individual-local-authority-data-outturn).

It is important that planning applications are determined in a timely and efficient manner. Local planning authorities can be designated as underperforming where they persistently fail to determine applications for major development on time, which has seen the proportion of major applications determined on time rising to an all-time high of 82 per cent, in the quarter ending 31 March 2016, since the regime was introduced in summer 2012. We plan to extend this regime to include non-major development.