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

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what assessment he has made of the reasons for delays to decisions on planning appeals by the Planning Inspectorate; and what steps he is taking to ensure prompt and timely adjudication on those decisions.

The Planning Inspectorate has been focusing their resources on casework with the greatest potential for economic impact and those with greatest community interest: national infrastructure, local plans and appeals requiring a hearing or inquiry before decision. The remaining capacity is used for casework decided by written representations.

The Inspectorate has been implementing actions to maintain performance in the areas currently performing well 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 is on track to recruit the planned 50 inspectors/other decision makers this year and are also recruiting 30 more. In the short-term, training new Inspectors reduces availability for casework;
• using contract (non-salaried) inspectors to the full extent of their availability and running a procurement exercise seeking to increase the pool of this resource; and
• training inspectors to handle different casework to increase flexibility.

The Inspectorate is also part way through a major investment programme which will support significant improvements to ways of working as well as providing a significantly improved customer experience.