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

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, when he plans to announce funding levels for local planning authorities to help tackle planning backlogs.

Local councils are responsible for ensuring that they build skills pipelines in their area to discharge their responsibilities. We recognise, however, that there have been challenges in recent years in plan and so, on a temporary basis, the Government is providing additional funds.

The £24 million Planning Skills Delivery Fund will help local authorities to recruit, retain and upskill planners to build a more sustainable planning system for the benefit of communities by helping local planning authorities clear planning backlogs and get the skills in place that they need to respond to changes in the planning system. This has been supplemented at Autumn Statement by an additional £5 million to clear the planning applications backlog.

We will announce the successful local authorities who applied for funding as part of the year one application process shortly.